NEW DETENTIONS SHED LIGHT ON MORE ERGENEKON CRIMES

Today’s Zaman
Jan 15 2009
Turkey

Former Police Department Special Operations Unit Deputy Chairman
Ä°brahim Å~^ahin was detained in last week’s operations.

A number of plans, lists, maps and arms caches unearthed last week
in the latest wave of searches and detentions carried out as part of
the Ergenekon investigation suggest that the group was behind many
provocative attacks and murders previously attributed to various
other organizations.

Some of the incidents that now appear to be Ergenekon jobs are
high profile events from Turkey’s recent history, all considered as
watershed catastrophes that fundamentally changed the country’s course.

In last week’s operations, former Police Department Special Operations
Unit Deputy Chairman Ä°brahim Å~^ahin was detained. Assassination plans
found in his home during searches showed clearly some of Ergenekon’s
future planned assassinations. Potential victims included Alevi leaders
such as Kazım Genc, head of the Pir Sultan Abdal Association. Since
last week’s operations, the individuals in danger have been assigned
police protection.

According to the documents found in Å~^ahin’s house, the group was
planning to kill Genc with a package bomb. The organization had worked
out the locations of Ä°stanbul’s security cameras, known as MOBESE, in
every region they planned to commit a murder. Police say the details
of the planned Genc assassination are strikingly similar to methods
used in killing Malatya Mayor Hamid Fendoglu, who was killed with a
package bomb in 1978. The killing was seen as a result of a conflict
between Alevi and Sunni communities in the city, the sort of chaos
Ergenekon wanted to provoke, according to investigators assigned to
the case. A similar bomb was used in the killing of Bahriye Ucok,
a socialist academic who was killed in 1990 with a package bomb. Her
killer was never found. These two murders were key events in the
process that led to the 1980 coup d’état in Turkey.

Another Alevi leader, Ali Balkız, was also on Ergenekon’s hit
list. The would-be assassins drew detailed maps of Balkız’s house
and his daily route and planned to detonate a car bomb parked along
this path as he drove. The 1993 killing of journalist Ugur Mumcu, who
was killed by a bomb planted in his car, and the killing of journalist
Mehmet Ali KıÅ~_lalı in 1999, two very important unresolved murders
of the ’90s, have a strong similarity in that both involved a plastic
explosive known as RDX, a very rare explosive that is extremely
difficult to acquire in Turkey, according to experts. In last week’s
operations, a formidable cache of A-4 RDX was unearthed in Ergenekon’s
secret munitions depots buried underground.

Other past events now very strongly suspected to be Ergenekon’s doing
include the 1990 killing of academic Muammer Aksyon, the 1990 killing
of Hurriyet daily Editor-in-Chief Cetin Emec, the 1990 killing of
Turan Dursun and the 2007 shooting of journalist Hrant Dink.

Armenian community leaders, including Patriarch Mesrob Mutafyan,
were also on Ergenekon’s hit list.

–Boundary_(ID_cw3T5df1DGG3KTAeWtdFBg)–