TURKEY: LAWYERS MOVE TO EXPAND SCOPE OF MALATYA TRIAL
Compass Direct News
lead&lang=en&length=long&idelement=576 2
Jan 20 2009
CA
Witnesses expected to connect murder of three Christians with political
conspiracy.
MALATYA, Turkey, January 20 (Compass Direct News) – Lawyers in the
case of three Christians who were murdered for their faith here are
lining up witnesses in an effort to expand the accused from five
young suspects to subversive forces at the top of state power.
Evidence in recent hearings suggests the April 2007 murders in
southeast Turkey were instigated by Ergenekon, a loose collection of
ultra-nationalist generals, businessmen, mafia and journalists who
planned to engineer a coup d’état in Turkey.
At a hearing at Malatya’s Third Criminal Court on Friday (Jan. 16),
plaintiff attorneys said they would like to call as a witness
Ergun Poyraz, a journalist arrested in 2007 who has been linked to
Ergenekon. Prosecuting attorneys said they believe that Poyraz, who
has written inflammatory rhetoric against missionaries and accused
Turkey’s prime minister of being part of a Zionist conspiracy, was not
directly involved in planning the murders but has important knowledge
of the players within Ergenekon.
The lawyers said they hope his testimony will help sort out the tangled
web of connections and determine the role of Malatya security forces in
the attack, particularly that of the chief of police in the district,
Ali Osman Kahya.
"In the course of the publishing house murders, Ali Osman Kahya was
the head of Malatya security forces, which is no coincidence," said
plaintiff attorney Murat Dincer. He said Kahya had been in similar
positions of authority during other political murders.
Other lawyers involved in the case said they are less hopeful,
believing Poyraz will only use his testimony as a platform for
political grandstanding and propaganda for the political conspiracy.
"I don’t believe he will be helpful," one legal worker told Compass. "I
think he will only put on a show and manipulate the subject."
Poyraz was arrested in 2007 for having connections to the Association
for the Union of Patriotic Forces, a group whose members include
military men also indicted in Ergenekon. Turkish media recently
revealed that Poyraz had been keeping detailed records on high-level
military officials prior to his arrest, according to Today’s Zaman
national daily.
The team of plaintiff lawyers has requested Poyraz’s written statements
from the Istanbul 13th Criminal Court.
The court in Malatya has sent an informal inquiry to the prosecutor of
the 13th High Criminal Court of Istanbul asking if there is a concrete
connection between the Ergenekon case and the Malatya murders. If the
prosecutor replies positively, the Malatya court will decide whether
to integrate the murder trial with the Ergenekon case.
If the cases are not integrated, then the five young suspects
will likely be tried for murder in a matter of months, and all will
receive life sentences, said Orhan Kemal Cengiz, who leads the team of
plaintiff lawyers who represent the interests of the victims’ families.
Lawyers said they believe establishing the guilt of the suspects
should be a straightforward process, but Cengiz said that if the case
is integrated into Ergenekon, "then it will continue forever."
No witnesses testified at the Friday hearing. The plaintiff team
eventually hopes to bring 21 witnesses to the stand in subsequent
hearings.
Impact on Defense
Two Turkish Christians, Necati Aydin and Ugur Yuksel, and a German,
Tilmann Geske, were brutally tortured and killed at a publishing
house in Malatya on April 18, 2007.
Emre Gunaydin – the suspected ringleader – along with Salih Gurler,
Cuma Ozdemir, Hamit Ceker and Abuzer Yildirim, who have been in jail
for the past 18 months, are accused of the murder. They were all
between 19 and 21 years old at the time of the crime.
The Malatya trial judges and defense attorneys are also adjusting their
legal proceedings in light of the case’s incipient expansion from a
murder case to an investigation into the political conspiracy. Noting
that there could have been others involved in the murder, Presiding
Judge Eray Gurktekin quoted an article from the Turkish Penal Code
that states a punishment can be reduced if the guilty party is found
to be solicited for the crime.
"You should think about considering this," he said to defense lawyers.
The lawyer for Gunaydin said he had reminded his client of this
article, and that they wanted to pursue this legal line in the next
hearing.
Plaintiff attorneys won a minor legal victory that had eluded them
in earlier hearings: The hearings will now be recorded. In previous
months Malatya judges refused three plaintiff requests to record the
trial hearings.
In February 2008 an Istanbul court allowed the first courtroom taping
of a trial hearing at the trial of Hrant Dink, a Turkish-Armenian
journalist assassinated in 2007.
Unearthing Plot
Earlier this month, Turkish police uncovered major arms caches by
excavating sites connected to Ergenekon members. Security forces
believe the weapons indicated the future plans of the group and their
violent activates in the past.
Two weeks ago a new wave of detentions revealed evidence that the
group was planning to assassinate the prime minister, members of the
Supreme Court of Appeals, and Armenian community leaders.
Older Ergenekon documents make mention of church members in Turkey in
Izmir, Mersin and Trabzon. Members of those churches were attacked or
killed in following years. This month a 19-year-old Muslim in Izmir
was sentenced to prison for stabbing a Catholic priest in 2007.
The Ergenekon organization has been blamed for the murder of other
high-profile Christians. Ergin Cinmen, the lawyer for the family of
Dink, has called for an investigation into the links between Ergenekon,
the Malatya massacre and the murders of Dink and Father Andrea Santoro,
an Italian priest killed in Trabzon in 2006.
He made these comments in the context of recently discovered plans to
attack the Armenian community of Sivas in central Turkey, according
to Bianet, an online Turkish news service.
In the last year, police have arrested more than 100 people in the
ongoing Ergenekon case, which has been the dominant event in Turkish
media for several months.
–Boundary_(ID_pOWAh4O65zsvFopL+hdSSQ)–