Posted on 04/18/2007 1:59:03 PM PDT by Cornpone
Attackers on Wednesday slit the throats of three people, including a German citizen, and caused one other to jump off a building which houses a Turkish publishing house which printed bibles, security officials said.
The injured person, who is fighting for survival in a Malatya hospital, apparently jumped off the building to escape the attackers.
Security officials said four people had been detained in connection with the attack in the southeastern city of Malatya. Televised images showed police wrestling one man to the ground and leading several young men out of the building, apparently in handcuffs.
Witnesses working in offices in the same building as the Zirve Publishing House said they heard no noise and did not notice anything out of the ordinary prior to the attack. Details of the attack including the motive and identity of the attackers were not immediately available.
The first official statement concerning the attack came from Malatya Governor H. İbrahim Daşöz who confirmed three deaths and one hospitalization. Daşöz said both the judiciary and security authorities were on the case, adding that the police had not ruled out the possibility that the killings might be the result of a fight between individuals at the publishing house. The governor also confirmed that three bodies at the scene were found blindfolded with their throats cut and hands tied behind their backs. The governor's statement confirmed two killed at the scene while a third, who was initially identified only by his first name Uğur, lost his life at hospital. The governor also said one of the slain was a German citizen.
The injured person was identified as Zafer Günaydın, who fell off a tall building as he tried to escape the attackers, according to the chief doctor of the Turgut Özal Medical Center. The center's doctor Murat Cem Miman, who talked to the NTV news channel, said Günaydın was suffering from a serious head injury apparently caused by falling off a tall building. His condition was extremely critical, Miman said. The man named Uğur was also taken to the same hospital with a severe stab wound, where he died, according to the statements which the chief doctor and the governor made within half an hour of each other.
A journalist talking to the NTV news channel mentioned that the publisher had faced allegations of printing outlawed publications. The governor said Christian missionary activities in the region were not necessarily intense. Some Turkish nationalists take Christian missionaries to be enemies of the country working to undermine Turkey's political and religious institutions. Nationalists had previously protested outside the Zirve publishing house in Malatya, accusing it of proselytizing, news reports said. An official from the publishing house told local television that they had received threats over its publications.
The attack recalls the murder earlier this year of Armenian-Turkish editor Hrant Dink by an ultranationalist teenage gunman, prompting extra security measures for writers and journalists. Dink was also from Malatya.
The government and other officials in Turkey have in the past criticized Christian missionary work here while the European Union, which Turkey hopes to join, has called for more freedom for the tiny Christian minority.
My friend observed that Turkey is supposed to be an ally, and a modern nation, but their culture is soaked with hatred for Christianity.
There were the usual Islamist terrorists milling about, but that comes with the turf.
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