TURKEY: LINKS TO MASTERMINDS OF MURDERS IN MALATYA PURSUED

Lawyers aim to uncover size, structure of ‘deep-state’ conspiracy.

ISTANBUL, February 24 (Compass Direct News) – The identities of the middlemen linking the attackers and the alleged masterminds in the murder of three Christians in Malatya, Turkey are expected to take clearer focus following the latest hearing.

“These five troubled youths didn’t wake up one morning and decide to commit a murder – there were others directing them,” Ozkan Yucel, plaintiff attorney representing the families of the victims, told the Turkish press last week, before Friday’s (Feb. 20) hearing at the Malatya Third Criminal Court in southeastern Turkey.

Two Turkish Christians, Necati Aydin and Ugur Yuksel, and a German, Tilmann Geske, were tied up and stabbed to death at Zirve Publishing Co. offices on April 18, 2007. The last several hearings of the trial have supported suspicions that others were involved in the murder besides the five youths suspected of carrying out the attack. More difficult, however, is determining the scope of the murders and the organization of its conspirators.

Plaintiff attorneys have called in a heavy slate of witnesses for the next hearing, ranging from a gendarmerie commander to an Islamic theology instructor at a nearby university. Mehmet Ulger, the former gendarmerie commander of the province, and Ruhi Abat, a theology instructor at the local Inonu University, are among the 10 people expected to testify at the April 13 hearing.

According to the Radikal daily newspaper, an anonymous letter sent to Turkish churches and obtained by the media claimed Ulger acted as an instigator to the murders and directed Abat to prepare arguments against missionary activity. The letter also implicates local politician Ruhi Polat, a member of the ultra-nationalist National People’s Party and a friend of the father of alleged ringleader Emre Gunaydin.

Plaintiff attorney Hafize Cobanoglu told Compass the anonymous letter played a part in the selection of Abat and Polat as witnesses.

“In this sense, paying heed to all these people is important,” she said. “However, I don’t believe they will say much when they testify.”

The call for new witnesses came two weeks after the arrest of two men suspected of acting as liaisons between the five suspects and the alleged “deep-state” masterminds of the attack.

Varol Bulent Aral, a journalist attached to a far-reaching political conspiracy known as Ergenekon, and Huseyin Yelki, a church-going, former volunteer at Zirve, were taken into custody earlier this month.

Aral, 32, has attempted to deflect blame for instigating the youths to commit the murders. He recently told a public prosecutor that the true force behind the killings was a gendarmerie intelligence unit established in the ’80s to counter Kurdish sectarian violence in the country’s southeast.

He claimed to have been approached by a member of the intelligence unit who sought his assistance. Aral said the member told him the unit would focus on three issues: missionary activity, Alevi-Sunni relations, and the Turkish-Kurd issue.

Aral claimed to have seen Gunaydin become involved with this unit, according to the daily Milliyet.

Recent court hearings, however, have produced substantial evidence that the true masterminds of the murder were members of Ergenekon, a clandestine nationalist group that sought to overthrow the current government by engineering domestic chaos.

Yelki, 34, has lived in the southern city of Adana for the nearly two years since the murder. He has had a rocky history with the leadership of Turkey’s small Protestant church, which he accused of abandoning him during difficult financial times in a series of defamatory e-mails.

He volunteered for six months at Zirve, site of the brutal torture and murder of the three Christians.

Gunaydin, the suspected ringleader of the youths accused of murder – including Salih Gurler, Cuma Ozdemir, Hamit Ceker, and Abuzer Yildirim – has claimed in previous hearings that he was offered promises of state support for killing the Christians.

In the course of Friday’s brief hearing, Ugur Yuksel’s mother, Hatice Yuksel, stood up and loudly asserted that Gunaydin had threatened her. She did not specify the nature of these threats, and court officials told her to be silent.

The next hearing for the trial is scheduled for April 13, four days before the second anniversary of the murders. Many attorneys believe the case will be fully integrated with the Ergenekon case in the upcoming months.

Report from Compass Direct News

TURKEY: TWO MORE ARRESTED IN MALATYA MURDERS

Ex-journalist, former volunteer at publishing house suspected of instigating slaughter.

ISTANBUL, February 12 (Compass Direct News) – A Turkish court has charged two more men for instigating the murder of three Christians in Malatya in 2007 – a former volunteer worker at the Christian publishing house where they were killed, and an ex-journalist suspected of ties to a group that tried to engineer a political coup.

The arrests add growing evidence to the belief that the murders resulted not just from five troubled youths incited by religious or nationalist anger, but from a larger plan to create chaos in the country and kill specific people.

A judge ordered the arrest of former journalist Varol Bulent Aral, 32, on Feb. 4 on suspicion of instigating the murder. The Malatya court had subpoenaed Aral multiple times to testify about his role in the killings, but he did not appear until last October after being arrested for other charges.

Plaintiff attorneys representing family members of the murder victims believe Aral incited the suspected ringleader of the attacks to murder by convincing him foreign missionaries were connected to the Kurdistan Worker’s Party, a domestic outlawed terrorist organization.

Aral has been connected to Ergenekon, an ultranationalist cabal of retired generals, politicians, journalists and mafia members under investigation for conspiracy in various murders. Over 100 people have been detained in connection with the network since July 2008.

Prosecuting attorney Erdal Dogan told the national daily Taraf that Aral’s arrest was an important, albeit insufficient, step in the trial.

“From the beginning, this suspect could have been included in the case as an instigator to murder,” he said. “This person had an inside connection [to the murder], and security forces also knew this.”

A total of nine men have been charged with the murders. Seven of them are in jail; Mehmet Gokce and Kursat Kocadag have not been detained.

 

Former Zirve Employee Indicted

Huseyin Yelki, 34, a Turk who has worked for Christian organizations, was arrested on Monday (Feb. 9) after suspected ringleader Emre Gunaydin implicated him for instigation of murder in testimony to a public prosecutor.

Yelki is a former volunteer worker at Zirve Publishing Co. in Malatya, site of the brutal torture and murder of two Turkish Christians, Necati Aydin and Ugur Yuksel, and a German, Tilmann Geske, on April 18, 2007. Last week Gunaydin claimed in his testimony that Aral and Yelki worked together to instigate the attack.

Yelki’s testimony at a hearing last August at the Malatya Third Criminal Court sharply differed from Gunaydin’s account. He said he was working part time at Zirve’s Malatya office when Gunaydin and two other men visited there about a month or six weeks before the murders. Gunaydin introduced himself, saying he wanted to meet Necati Aydin. But when Yelki telephoned Aydin and learned he would be coming to the office an hour later, the three men left.

Yelki said that instance was the only time he had ever met Gunaydin, that he never saw the men again and that he could not remember their faces. In a statement to police, Yelki said that Gunaydin had completely fabricated their relationship, and that he (Yelki) did not believe Christianity and missionary activity were harmful to Turkey.

But plaintiff attorneys said they believe that there is good reason to believe that Yelki was involved in the murders.

“Emre Gunaydin gave a very detailed account of his collaboration with Huseyin Yelki, which is consistent with other evidence in the court file,” said Orhan Kemal Cengiz, who leads the team of plaintiff lawyers.

“What Emre said indicates that they had a sophisticated relationship which goes back to 2006, and apparently Yelki was involved in the plot at every level and phase,” he said. “We already know that Yelki was also connected to Bulent Varol Aral, who undoubtedly has some dark connections with some deep-state elements.”

Regarding possible motives Yelki might have had for involvement in the murders, however, plaintiff attorneys said it was too early in the investigation to know.

 

Finding Instigators

Plaintiff attorneys said they are hopeful that the arrests of the two men will provide important answers to many questions regarding the true identity of masterminds behind the murder.

While the attorneys said they don’t believe Aral and Yelki are the masterminds themselves, they hope these two men could act as links for the investigation to go higher up the chain of command.

“In my opinion, Yelki and Aral are just middle guys between the real instigators and the ‘hit-men,’” said Cengiz, leader of the team of plaintiff lawyers. “Their inclusion into the court file has sparked hope inside me for the first time since the case has ever started. I hope we will be able to reach the higher links and deliver justice to them.”

The next hearing in the case is scheduled to take place in Malatya on Feb. 20.

Report from Compass Direct News

MEXICO: THREE FAMILY MEMBERS MURDERED IN CHIAPAS

Suspecting family of witchcraft, neighbor’s gang takes machetes to adults, children.

MEXICO CITY, September 3 (Compass Direct News) – When the 11-year-old daughter of Antonio Gomez became ill of a stomach ailment, her father decided that it was due to witchcraft committed by his evangelical neighbor.

Gomez, of the Jolitontic community of Chalchihuitan municipality in Chiapas state, gathered seven friends to kill the family of the supposed culprit. After midnight on August 23, they allegedly killed three adults – the parents and their eldest son – and wounded six children with machetes.

Mariano Lopez Perez, public prosecutor of Indian Justice, reportedly said neighbors regarded the father in the attacked family, Pedro Gomez Diaz, as “an evangelical who prayed a great deal.” The neighbors reportedly denied that the family believed in or practiced any kind of witchcraft as far as they knew.

According to Tuxtla Gutierrez-based Cuarto Poder newspaper in Chiapas, all eight of the men who participated in the massacre of three Indians in Jolitontic are now in jail in San Cristobal de las Casas, awaiting justice.

The attackers burst into the hut of the family to kill first the eldest son, Rene, 32. They then slashed the mother, Marcela Hernandez Giron Gomez, and the father, Gomez Diaz.

Before he died Gomez Diaz’s cries alerted the rest of the family, but the murderers managed to seriously wound six other children: Esteban, 4; Ernesto, 6; Anita, 7; Maria, 14; Petrona, 16; and Martin, 18. They were all taken to the public health hospital of San Cristobal de las Casas.

Petrona Diaz was reported to be in the most serious condition; two of the children required surgery. The hospital refused to give further information to Compass, but reports regarding the children indicate that Petrona Diaz suffered the amputation of one thumb and an exposed broken bone.

Maria Diaz was reportedly gravely ill, and her siblings Ernesto and Anita were discharged from the hospital on Aug. 25. The next day they went to be with their grandmother in another town.

Authorities reportedly found three machetes that had been used in the attack, hidden in the brush.

Police reportedly buried the bodies of the three murder victims in a common grave behind their house, as “because they had no relatives in the community.”  

Report from Compass Direct News