PROSECUTOR SUSPECTED ERGENEKON LINKS FROM START
Today’s Zaman
Feb 1 2008
Turkey
An Ýstanbul prosecutor currently working on the case of a shadowy
network that is believed to have been behind many crimes, including
political assassinations, had asked an Ankara court for the documents
of the case related to the 2006 Council of State shootings, to which
his current suspects in the Ergenekon case seem to be linked, news
reports said on Thursday.
The ongoing investigation into the crime network shows that the
prosecutor has taken painstaking effort to draw up the links between
various suspects and gangs in his earlier research that lead to dozens
of arrests last week.
A police operation last week carried out as part of an investigation
into a house filled with explosives in Ýstanbul resulted in the
arrests of dozens of members of a crime network — known as Ergenekon
— accused of involvement in plans for a violent uprising against
the government. The operation was a culmination of an eight-month
police investigation that has been pending since the arms depot was
discovered in June last year.
Before last week’s raids were even staged, the Ýstanbul Public
Prosecutor’s office investigating the house full of munitions had
requested that the Ankara 11th Higher Criminal Court — which is
overseeing the cases of the two crime networks known as Sauna and
Atabeyler as well as a deadly shooting at the Council of State —
send it copies of the indictments and expert reports for each of
the cases. The Ergenekon gang is accused of the Council of State
shooting as well, a suspicion that was confirmed only last week when
29 of Ergenekon members testified in court. The Ankara court sent
the documents to the prosecutor in December of last year.
Earlier, the Ankara 11th Higher Criminal Court itself had asked for
the documents of the case regarding the house full of munitions in
relation to the Council of State shooting trial, due to apparent links
between the suspects of the two cases. Fourteen suspects were detained
in last week’s dawn operations into the Ergenekon gang, including Veli
Kucuk, a retired major general who is also the alleged founder of an
illicit intelligence unit in the gendarmerie, the existence of which
is denied by officials; the controversial ultranationalist lawyer
Kemal Kerincsiz, who filed countless suits against Turkish writers
and intellectuals who were at odds with Turkey’s official policies;
Fikret Karadað, a retired army colonel; Sevgi Erenerol, the press
spokesperson for a shady church group called the Turkish Orthodox
Patriarchate; and Sami Hoþtan, a key figure in an investigation
launched after a car accident in 1996 near the small town of Susurluk
that uncovered links between a police chief, a convicted fugitive
who was an ultranationalist and a deputy.
Ali Yasak, a well-known gangster linked to the figures in the Susurluk
incident, was also detained in the operation.
A total of 29 people are currently under arrest as part of the
Ergenekon investigation. The prosecution accuses the Ergenekon
organization of "attempting to take over the state, disrupting public
order and weakening the authority of the state."
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoðan said his government would not let
any of the country’s institutions be slandered, referring to recent
controversy about the military sparked by the Ergenekon organization,
although he did not specifically identify the situation.
Chief of General Staff Gen. Yaþar Buyukanýt, in a statement earlier
this week, strongly criticized what he called efforts to associate
the acts of "illegal organizations" with the Turkish Armed Forces
(TSK), saying that the TSK is not a crime organization. Some arrested
in the operation against the Ergenekon network include retired army
officers. The investigation has also found that the group was working
to lay the groundwork for a coup to be staged by the military in 2009.
In his Address to the Nation speech on Thursday, Erdoðan said: "’We
will not in any way stand for the besmirching of our institutions. In
this struggle, all our agencies, the judiciary, the police, the
military, the media and civil society are doing their best. I am
pleased to see that trust in our institutions has been increasing.
There are some who are uneasy as we are more and more peaceful. They
know that they get weaker as long as our bonds of brotherhood are
growing stronger."
Turkey against the gangs
Operation Globe in 2005 was the start of Turkey’s investigation into
gangs, whose reach was found to extend to the state bureaucracy
and foreign secret services. These gangs, which carry out attacks
to defend the old system in which a staunchly secularist elite does
not share power with any other group, are collectively known as the
"deep state". Almost every crime gang that has former or current
army or security service members seems to be linked to each other,
evidence from the recent investigations shows.
The "Sauna Gang" was exposed in February 2006. Its members included
a former police chief and an army captain. The gang used photographs
showing politicians in inappropriate positions, mostly in saunas, but
as the investigation deepened, evidence indicated that its involvement
went deeper than merely extorting money, and its links with the rest
of the shady neo-nationalist groups became apparent. In May 2006 a
senior judge was killed in an attack against the Council of State,
one of Turkey’s three higher courts. The hit man was a neo-nationalist
lawyer, Alparslan Arslan, but the links he had to other individuals
could not be thoroughly investigated at the time.
Meanwhile, an investigation into hand grenades thrown at the Cumhuriyet
newspaper office also in May 2006 found that the hand grenades were
obtained from the Turkish military. Retired Cap.
Muzaffer Tekin, who was taken into custody as part of the Council of
State attack, was released by a court at the time. In the same month,
13 people, including three army officers, were arrested, when a house
full of guns and munitions was discovered in the capital. A similar
arms depot was discovered in June 2007 in Ýstanbul, also bearing
explosives and hand grenades. The grenades found in the house had
the same serial numbers as those used in the Cumhuriyet bombing.
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The Ergenekon investigation More and more interesting details about the
Ergenekon and some of its members have surfaced as the investigation
into the group continues.
Many of the future plans of the group — which is already suspected
of the murder of three Christians in 2007, the murder of a priest
in the northern city of Trabzon, the murder of Armenian journalist
Hrant Dink in 2007, the 2006 shooting attack against the Council of
State and grenades thrown at the Cumhuriyet newspaper — were revealed.
Ergenekon had plotted to kill Turkey’s Nobel Prize winning author
Orhan Pamuk and had already hired two triggermen. It also had plans
to assassinate some Kurdish politicians and even the neo-nationalist
lawyer Kerincsiz, a member of the gang publicly known for filing
criminal complaints against writers and intellectuals he found to be
unpatriotic. Killing Kerincsiz would create chaos, which they hoped
would lay the groundwork for an uneasy environment in the country
that would justify a military coup against the government in 2009.
–Boundary_(ID_ch7UHX4GDbxg8eUlsCkBQQ)–