Ottawa Citizen, Ontario, Canada
March 7, 2005 Monday
Final Edition
Turkish diplomat survived 1985 embassy siege: Ambassador hurled
himself out window during attack
by Nick Petter, The Ottawa Citizen
On a cold Tuesday in March 1985, the Turkish ambassador to Canada
threw himself out a second-storey window to escape a squad of
terrorists armed with assault rifles and hand grenades who were
storming his Ottawa embassy. Twenty years later, the events of that
morning’s siege are still fresh in the memories of those who were
there.
“It’s as if it happened yesterday. I remember everything,” says
Ottawa police Const. Michel Prud’Homme, the first officer to respond
to the embassy siege.
What Const. Prud’-Homme did over the next four hours that day would
earn him the Medal of Bravery and save the life of the then-Turkish
ambassador, Coskun Kirca.
After the attack, Mr. Kirca remained in Canada as the ambassador for
several years before returning to Turkey, where he served in many
high-level state posts, including foreign minister. Mr. Kirca died of
a heart attack last Thursday in Istanbul at the age of 78. He was
laid to rest the next day, almost exactly 20 years after his brush
with death in Ottawa.
On the morning of March 12, 1985, a cold rain was spitting on the
windows of Mr. Kirca’s bedroom at the Turkish Embassy in Sandy Hill.
Out front, a security guard at the compound was about to finish his
12-hour shift.
It was just before 7 a.m. when the guard saw a U-Haul van backing up
to the three-metre-high embassy wall. When the van hit the wall, its
doors burst open and three heavily armed terrorists, members of the
Armenian Revolutionary Army, climbed up the van and down the fence.
“Code red, code red, they’re shooting at me,” the guard yelled into
the radio in his steel-fortified guardhouse as its windows exploded
around him. He left the guardhouse and fired four shots from his
.38-calibre revolver. One of the three attackers returned fire with a
12-gauge shotgun. The fatal shot hit the guard in the chest, knocking
him off his feet.
The three men then ran to the heavy oak front door of the embassy. In
front of it they placed a package wired to a motorcycle battery.
An RCMP officer later testified that this home-made bomb had blown
open the embassy doors with such force that he found oak splinters
embedded in a brick wall across the street.
Ercan Kilic, 16 at the time, was asleep in the basement. He lived
there in an apartment with his parents, who were both embassy support
staff. Twenty years later, he still remembers the terrible violence
of the explosion that woke him.
“My mother woke up first and went upstairs to find out what was going
on. She realized the embassy was being attacked when she saw one of
the gunman,” he says.
As she hurried back to warn her family, the gunman threw a grenade
down the stairs after her.
“They found the grenade at the bottom of the stairs,” Mr. Kilic says.
An explosives expert with the Ottawa police testified later that the
grenade’s pin had been pulled and its fuse had burned, but it somehow
did not explode. He also noted that it had landed next to a propane
tank. Had it exploded, the entire embassy would have been destroyed.
“At the time, I was in a panic. I didn’t realize what was being
thrown because of the sound of guns going off, the explosions
everywhere,” Mr. Kilic says.
Mr. Kilic, whose English was better than that of his parents, was
told to call for help. With the sound of heavy footsteps, screaming,
and gunfire overhead, he ran to a phone and contacted the police.
Several minutes later, Const. Michel Prud’Homme, then only 25, was
first to respond.
“I saw a person lying on the ground next to the embassy. I didn’t
know who it was at first,” the officer says now, recalling the
situation.
Const. Prud’Homme jumped the fence, ran over the man splayed on the
ground, and dragged him to the side of the house, out of the gunman’s
line of fire. “I was lucky, I was very lucky,” he says. “Because if I
had arrived a minute or two later, I probably would have been shot by
the terrorists. But I didn’t learn about that until later.”
He would also soon learn that the man he had helped was not the
security guard who had been shot and killed, but the ambassador
himself.
Mr. Kirca, perhaps trying to escape what he believed was certain
death at the hands of the Armenian terrorists, had thrown himself out
the window of his second-floor bedroom. His right arm, right leg, and
pelvis were broken in the fall.
For almost five hours, in the cold and the pouring rain, Const.
Prud’Homme kept Mr. Kirca hidden. “Had they known where we were, all
they had to do was open a little window that was about six feet above
my head and drop a grenade,” the officer recalls. “They would have
done us both in. They were there to kill him. They didn’t care who
they got in the meantime. So I would have just been collateral
damage.”
While Const. Prud’Homme was pinned down outside, and Mr. Kilic and
his family were trapped in the basement, the terrorists upstairs
talked to the press and negotiated with police.
“We are the Armenian Liberation army, and we got demands,” one of the
terrorists told a CBC Radio reporter. “We want our land back and we
want the Turkish government to recognize the Armenian genocide in
1915.”
The gunman had taken hostages: the ambassador’s wife, his daughter,
and a friend of his daughter’s who had slept over. The friend was Mr.
Kilic’s 13-year-old sister.
“We knew nothing about what was going on. We assumed that the
ambassador and his family had been killed, including my sister,” Mr.
Kilic says.
The hostages were finally released and Mr. Kirca recovered from his
injuries at the National Defence Medical Centre.
After returning to Turkey, some of Mr. Kirca’s political opponents
later questioned his actions of that day in March. “I saw him being
questioned in Turkey at one point by people who asked him, ‘Why did
leave your wife and your daughter to the mercy of the terrorists?'”
says Fazli Corman, counsellor at the Turkish Embassy in Ottawa.
“But for most it was seen as a courageous act to save his life and
the honour of the ambassadorship.”
Before his posting to Canada, Mr. Kirca served as Turkey’s permanent
delegate to NATO, and then the United Nations.
Mr. Kirca left politics on Dec. 5, 1995, when he resigned from prime
minister Tansu Ciller’s cabinet after participating in an
unsuccessful bid to postpone an election. It was then that he began
writing an influential column for a centre-right Turkish newspaper,
Aksam. As a foreign policy analyst, he was known for his hawkish
positions.
Mr. Kirca warned his government that if it was not careful, it could
lose control of some territory to separatist movements in Cyprus and
southeastern Turkey. He also supported the policies of U.S. President
George W. Bush in the region, writing that “Turkey should not
disappoint its main ally, the United States.”
His hardline stance on Turkey’s conflict with Greece over Cyprus made
news in 1999, when the Turkish press found out that his daughter,
Selcan, had married Dimitri Papadopulos in 1998, the son of a retired
Greek air force general.
Mr. Corman says Mr. Kirca will be remembered above all for the ordeal
he endured in Ottawa in 1985. Although attacks on Turkish ambassadors
were not uncommon between 1973 and 1986, the siege of Mr. Kirca’s
embassy was headlined in all the Turkish papers.
The events of that day, says Mr. Corman, remain vivid to the members
of the Turkish Foreign Service, particularly to him. “My window looks
out onto the Rideau River. It’s the same window Ambassador Kirca
threw himself out of.”
In 2004, Canada became one of the few countries to formally recognize
as genocide the deportation and subsequent death of as many as 1.5
million Armenians at the hands of the Turkish military after the
First World War.
Armenia has been independent since the breakup of the Soviet Union in
1992, and the Armenian Revolutionary Army has not committed an act of
terrorism since 1986.
The three gunmen — Kevork Marachelian, Ohannes Noubarian and Raffi
Panof Titizian — were sentenced to 25 years in prison without
parole.
“I’m not sure how many of them are still in jail,” says Mr. Corman.
“We tried to get the information two years ago, by writing diplomatic
notes, but we didn’t receive anything out of it.
“It should be a diplomatic nicety to tell us. But we won’t press
ahead, because then it looks as if we are trying to get involved in
the local affairs of Canada.”
The National Parole Board decided last month to allow one of the men,
Mr. Marachelian, to visit his family for the first time in 20 years.
The board granted him two visits over the next six months, during
which he must be accompanied by a corrections officer.
“We do not feel any animosity against these people,” says Mr. Corman.
“We don’t want to track them or make life difficult for them. We just
wanted them to face justice.”
If the attack of 1985 happened today, it would probably be handled
differently.
Before 1985, foreign diplomats in Canada had long complained about
the lax security provided to the embassies in Ottawa.
After the attack, prime minister Brian Mulroney’s Conservative
government moved quickly to review Canada’s counter-terrorism
capabilities. The review led eventually to the creation of Canada’s
top-secret commando unit, Joint Task Force Two.
GRAPHIC:
Colour Photo: Coskun Kirca died of a heart attack last Thursday in
Istanbul at the age of 78.;
Colour Photo: Paul Latour, The Ottawa Citizen; Medics treat Turkish
ambassador Coskun Kirca after the diplomat jumped from a
second-storey window during a terrorist attack on the embassy March
12, 1985, in Ottawa.;
Photo: Fred Chartrand, The Canadian Press; Members of the Ottawa
police tactical squad take a suspect into custody during the 1985
embassy siege.;
Photo: Brigitte Bouvier, The Ottawa Citizen; Const. Michel Prud’Homme
was awarded the Medal of Bravery for saving Turkish ambassador Coskun
Kirca on March 12, 1985.