AS INDICTMENT READING ENDS, DEFENSE BEGINS IN ERGENEKON TRIAL
Today’s Zaman
Nov 11 2008
Turkey
The reading of a massive indictment against 86 suspects in the first
trial against Ergenekon, a criminal network accused of plotting to
overthrow the government, was completed yesterday at the trial’s
11th hearing.
Because some of the suspects’ lawyers had demanded shortly after the
beginning of the trial in October that the 2,455-page indictment be
read aloud, most of the trial time has been spent on this process
since the third hearing on Oct. 27.
The Ä°stanbul 13th High Criminal Court is hearing the case in a
makeshift courtroom inside Silivri Prison near Ä°stanbul. Among the
86 suspects are retired Gen. Veli Kucuk; lawyer Kemal Kerincsiz,
who is known for filing lawsuits against intellectuals over writings
that question or criticize the state line on issues such as Armenian
allegations of genocide; and retired Capt. Muzaffer Tekin. Forty-six of
the suspects are in custody, and the rest have been released pending
the outcome of the trial.
Meanwhile, lawyer Bozkurt Nuhoglu in yesterday’s hearing asked the
presiding judge to hold a moment of silence for the nation’s founder,
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, to mark the 70th anniversary of his death.
The judge rejected the request, saying, "We completed that duty before
we came here."
Nuhoglu is representing Emin Gurses, a professor of international
relations who was detained in the Ergenekon investigation on Feb. 26
Eruygur’s health deteriorating
Meanwhile, a lawyer representing retired Gen. Å~^ener Eruygur, a
prime suspect in the Ergenekon trial who was released by order of
the Ä°stanbul 9th Higher Criminal Court after he suffered a brain
hemorrhage as a result of a head injury in a fall in October, said
yesterday his client has been acting "strangely" since undergoing
brain surgery.
Filiz Ersen told journalists yesterday that the general kept slipping
into unconsciousness and that his behavior was erratic, sometimes like
that of a child. "Sometimes he can’t even recognize his wife. He can
only walk when two people are supporting him on either side. He thinks
the gendarmerie officers assigned to protect him are prison guards,
and he gets very scared."
Eruygur is undergoing treatment at the Kocaeli University Teaching
and Research Hospital.
His lawyer said once his client can maintain his consciousness more
fully, they will be filing the necessary legal complaints against
the relevant institutions regarding the accident Eruygur had in prison.
Ergenekon indictment
The existence of Ergenekon has long been suspected, but the current
investigation into the group began only in 2007, when a house in
Ä°stanbul’s Umraniye district that was being used as an arms depot
was discovered by police.
The indictment, made public in July, claims that the Ergenekon
network is behind a series of political assassinations carried out
over the past two decades for the ultimate purpose of triggering a
military coup and taking over the government. The victims include
secularist journalist Ugur Mumcu, long believed to have been
assassinated by Islamic extremists in 1993; the head of a business
conglomerate, Ozdemir Sabancı, who was shot dead by militants of the
extreme-left Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party/Front (DHKP/C)
in his high-security office in 1996; and secularist academic Necip
Hablemitoglu, who was also believed to have been killed by Islamic
extremists in 2002.
Suspects face various charges, including "membership in an armed
terrorist group," "attempting to destroy the government," "inciting
people to rebel against the Republic of Turkey" and other similar
crimes.
Prosecutor gives HoÅ~_tan speedy response
A suspect who objected to the description of his job as a drug
smuggler in the Ergenekon indictment received a speedy response from
prosecutors yesterday at a courtroom set up in Silivri Prison, where
all 86 suspects in the case are being held.
During the reading of the indictment at yesterday’s hearing, Sami
HoÅ~_tan, a key figure in an investigation launched after a car
accident in 1996 near the small town of Susurluk that uncovered links
between a police chief, a convicted ultranationalist fugitive and a
member of Parliament, said the prosecution was aiming to smear his
name by referring to him as a drug smuggler in the indictment.
Responding to allegations that he was involved in the narcotics
trade in cooperation with a clandestine and illegitimate gendarmerie
intelligence unit known as JÄ°TEM, HoÅ~_tan demanded that the
prosecution withdraw the parts of the indictment where he is
referred to as a drug smuggler. Mehmet Ali Pekguzel, one of the three
prosecutors in the case, gave a speedy response in the courtroom,
noting that HoÅ~_tan was captured in Germany on Oct. 10, 1974 while
trying to sell four kilograms of heroin to undercover German officers,
for which he was convicted a year later and sentenced to five years,
six months in prison, after which he was extradited to Turkey. HoÅ~_tan
did not respond to the prosecution’s statement.
Also yesterday, suspect Kemal Kerincsiz, a controversial
ultranationalist lawyer who filed countless lawsuits against Turkish
writers and intellectuals who were at odds with Turkey’s official
policies regarding Armenian genocide allegations, accused the
prosecution of having set traps for secret witnesses in the case. "I
can’t call these people jurists. I don’t believe that secret witness
testimonies before cameras were transcribed correctly. I demand
that all footage be given to the court and that the secret witnesses
testify before the court. I think there is a nauseating and despicable
relationship between the secret witnesses and the prosecution."
Prosecutor Pekguzel asserted that Kerincsiz exceeded the boundaries
of his rights as a defendant and requested that prosecutors file
a complaint against Kerincsiz with the Silivri Public Prosecutor’s
Office. Erkan Acar, BuÅ~_ra Erdal Ä°stanbul
–Boundary_(ID_NDsflAsXCCEYZZ nycO0yUQ)–
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress