Three killed in attack on Bible publishing house in Turkey

19/04/2007

Rising nationalism and enmity towards religious minorities have been blamed for a new incident in Turkey.

(The Guardian, Independent, Telegraph - 19/04/07; AP, Reuters, DPA, BBC, VOA, FT, International Herald Tribune - 18/04/07)

An injured man lies on a stretcher outside a publishing house in Malatya on Wednesday (April 18th). [Getty Images]

Three employees of a company that prints and distributes Bibles were killed in Turkey on Wednesday (April 18th) in the latest attack on the country's tiny Christian minority.

The victims -- two Turks and a German citizen -- were found in the building of the Zirve publishing house in Turkey's southeastern city of Malatya, with their hands and legs tied and their throats slit. The province's governor, Halil Ibrahim Dasoz, said in televised comments that one of the Turks was still alive when found but died later in hospital.

The German victim, identified by state-run Anatolia news agency as 46-year-old Tilman Ekkehart Geske, had been living in Malatya since 2003, the official said. The other two victims were identified as Necati Aydin and Ugur Yuksel.

Zirve general manager Hamza Ozant told CNN-Turk that the men were considering asking for police protection, following recent threats.

Istanbul-based evangelical pastor Carlos Madrigal told Reuters that the three were evangelical Protestants, whom he knew.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose country is seeking EU membership, but has often been urged by Brussels to ensure greater protection of religious and other minority freedoms, condemned the attack, describing it as "savagery".

Four Turks, aged 19 to 20, were arrested on suspicion of involvement in the incident and a fifth suspect was taken to hospital with serious injuries he suffered after jumping out of a window in an attempt to escape arrest. According to Anatolia agency, they were all found to be carrying a letter, reading: "We five are brothers. We are going to our deaths."

Speaking at a news conference broadcast on national television, Interior Minister Abdulkadir Aksu said some of the suspects were carrying weapons.

CNN reports that five more people were arrested on Thursday in connection with the murders.

Condemning the assault, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, whose country currently holds the rotating EU presidency, urged Turkish authorities to do their best "to clear up this crime completely and bring those responsible to justice".

Judging by the mode of killing, Turkish investigators suspected the assailants could be linked to Turkish Hizbollah, a Kurdish Islamic group striving to create a Muslim state in Turkey's Kurdish-dominated southeast.

"These are fanatics who continue to be present in Turkey and who at a moment's notice emerge with acts of absurd violence," Monsignor Luigi Padovese, the Vatican representative in Turkey, was quoted as saying in comments on Wednesday's killings.

The new incident came amid growing concerns about rising nationalism in Turkey, where a teenager gunned down a Roman Catholic priest about 14 months ago. Several months later, two other priests were attacked. In yet another shocking incident, prominent Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink was assassinated outside his office in Istanbul in January.

Turkey's Christian community accounts for less than 1% of the country's population of more than 70 million people, the vast majority of them Muslims.

"In some ways the situation has improved because we have legal rights ... but there are parts of society which have become radicalised," said Madrigal, whose church has been under police protection since Dink's murder, which prompted widespread public condemnation.

More than 100,000 Turks attended the journalist's funeral in Istanbul. According to an AP report, some 150 people marched in Turkey's largest city on Wednesday to protest the new killings, expressing their solidarity by holding banners that read: "We are all Christians".