ERGENEKON COLONEL’S $1 MLN TRANSFER EXPOSED
Today’s Zaman
Aug 21 2008
Turkey
A former army colonel detained on Thursday in connection with the
ongoing Ergenekon investigation transferred $1 million to a relative
in the US while serving in Yalova as commander of the provincial
gendarmerie unit, but the source of this money is entirely unknown,
Turkish newspapers reported yesterday.
According to documents published yesterday in daily Milliyet, retired
Col. Arif Dogan, detained as part of the Ergenekon investigation last
Thursday, sent $1 million to Arzu IÅ~_ıl Dogan, a relative residing
in the US. Arif Dogan was detained last week after the discovery
that a house belonging to him in Ä°stanbul’s Beykoz district was
being used as a military arms depot. Col. Dogan is said to be one
of the founders of JÄ°TEM — an intelligence unit in the gendarmerie
whose existence is officially denied. Other alleged JÄ°TEM founders,
including a retired general, Veli Kucuk, have been arrested in the
operation on charges of Ergenekon membership.
In addition to a large amount of explosives, TNT blocks, Kalashnikovs,
bullets and other munitions, intelligence reports on Kurdish clans of
the East and the Southeast and a satellite communications device as
well as secret maps detailing various provincial gendarmerie command
centers were found.
The documents were unearthed days after the initial discovery last
Thursday, and only after a search warrant from Ergenekon Prosecutor
Zekeriya Oz was available. In addition to the mysterious intelligence
reports, a receipt documenting the large money transfer Dogan made
to Arzu IÅ~_ıl Dogan was found here.
A personal daily organizer from 1995 kept by Kucuk, currently being
indicted on charges of being one of Ergenekon’s founding members,
seized in the suspect’s home in Ä°stanbul’s BeÅ~_iktaÅ~_ district
during the investigation, has proven key to many dealings of Ergenekon,
including to those of Dogan. The planner sheds light on some very
shady relations.
One of the notes taken by Kucuk in the notebook from Nov. 19, 1990
describes in detail an arms transfer ordered by none other than
Col. Dogan to a member of the left-wing terrorist organization the
Turkish Workers and Peasants’ Liberation Army (TÄ°KKO). According to
Kucuk’s notes, the arms transfer took place in fall 1989.
The revelation from the organizer comes a few weeks after evidence
suggesting that Ergenekon was involved in the sale of 24,000 guns of
the Turkish military to the terrorist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).
The prosecutors, in an indictment they made public last month, claim
that the Ergenekon network is behind a series of earth-shattering
political assassinations over the past two decades. The victims include
a 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; secularist academic
Necip Hablemitoglu, who was also believed to have been killed by
Islamic extremists, in 2002; and a 2006 attack on the Council of State
that left a senior judge dead. Alparslan Arslan, found guilty of the
Council of State killing, said he attacked the court in protest of an
anti-headscarf ruling it had made. But the indictment contains evidence
that he was connected with Ergenekon and that his family received
large sums of money from unidentified sources after the shooting.
The indictment also says Kucuk, believed to be one of the leading
members of the network, had threatened Hrant Dink, a Turkish-Armenian
journalist slain by a teenager in 2007, before his murder — a sign
that Ergenekon could be behind that killing as well.
–Boundary_(ID_YZFLR7avQ1lkjaxi3xvp0A)–
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
