Today’s Zaman, Turkey
Jan 29 2007
Assailants break windows of a church in Samsun
Unknown assailants on Sunday stoned a two-story building housing a
Protestant church in the Black Sea port city of Samsun, the pastor of
the church said.
"The assailants broke at least 10 windows in an overnight attack,"
said Mehmet Orhan Pıçaklar, the pastor of the Agape Church.
"This is the seventh or eight such attack over the past three years.
Separately, I am constantly receiving death threats by e-mail."
Pıçaklar said the church had moved into the building just two
weeks ago. Uniformed police officers were deployed outside the church
after the attack. The attack was the latest against Christians in
predominantly Muslim Turkey.
Ethnic Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, who spoke out about the mass
killings of Armenians in the early 20th century, was gunned down
outside his newspaper on Jan. 19.
Last February, a Turkish teenager shot dead a Catholic priest, the
Rev. Andrea Santoro, as he knelt in prayer in his church in the Black
Sea port of Trabzon. The attack was believed linked to widespread
anger in the Islamic world over the publication in European
newspapers of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad. Two other Catholic
priests were also attacked last year. Of Turkey’s 70 million people,
some 65,000 are Armenian Orthodox Christians, 20,000 are Roman
Catholic, and 3,500 are Protestant, mostly converts from Islam.
Around 2,000 are Greek Orthodox and 23,000 are Jewish. İstanbul
Today?s Zaman with wires