Global Post
April 12 2015

Turkey says deeply disappointed by pope’s comments on Armenian killings

Reuters

ANKARA (Reuters) – Turkey told the Vatican’s ambassador on Sunday it
was “deeply sorry and disappointed” that Pope Francis had called the
1915 mass killings in Armenia a genocide, an official said, adding the
pope’s comments had caused a “problem of trust”.

The pope made the comments earlier in the day during a Mass marking
the 100th anniversary of the killings.

Muslim Turkey accepts that many Christian Armenians died in clashes
with Ottoman soldiers beginning in 1915, when Armenia was part of the
empire ruled from Istanbul, but denies hundreds of thousands were
killed and that this amounted to genocide.

(Reporting by Orhan Coskun and Tulay Karadeniz; Writing by David
Dolan; Editing by Andrew Heavens)