Turkish police have detained 10 people in connection with the killing of three people, including a German, at a Bible publishing house in the mainly Muslim country, authorities said yesterday.
The three were found on Wednesday with their throats slit at the Zirve publishing house in Malatya, 650km east of Ankara.
The killings appeared to be the latest attack on minorities in Turkey following the killings of a Roman Catholic priest from Italy last year and an Turkish-Armenian editor Hrant Dink in January.
Voicing shock across the country at the latest attack on Turkey's small Christian minority, a headline in the Milliyet daily said: "The nightmare continues."
Malatya Governor Halil Ibrahim Dasoz told reporters the number of people in custody had risen to 10 and that all were from the same age group. He gave no further details.
NOTES FOUND
The first five suspects, detained at the crime scene on Wednesday, were 19 and 20-year-old students who lived in the same hostel run by an Islamic foundation, newspapers reported. They said the youths carried notes in their pockets saying: "We are brothers. We are going to our death."
They reportedly told police they carried out the killing for the "homeland."
Turkish Christians voiced distress over the killings, saying distrust of Christianity was being stirred up in Turkey where there are just 100,000 Christians in a population of 74 million.
"It was a disgusting, savage incident. I link it to comments made by party leaders ... feeding people with comments like `there are missionaries everywhere,'" Pastor Behnan Konutgan said by telephone from Malatya where he was visiting relatives of the victims.
He dined with the victims just two weeks ago.
The Anatolia news agency identified the victims as 46-year-old Tilman Ekkehart Geske, a German citizen, and Turkish citizens Necati Aydin and Ugur Yuksel, who were reportedly employees of the publishing house.
Newspapers described Aydin as the head of the tiny Christian community in Malatya.
Yuksel was buried according to Muslim rites yesterday in a village near Elazig in eastern Turkey.
ELECTION TENSIONS
The killings came as political tensions rise between Turkey's powerful secular elite, including army generals and judges, and the religious-minded AK Party government over next month's presidential elections.
A wave of nationalism has swept the secular but predominantly Sunni Muslim country over the past year. For many nationalists, missionaries are enemies of Turkey working to undermine its political and religious institutions. Hardline Islamists have also targeted Christian missionaries in Turkey, which is seeking EU membership.
Joost Lagendijk of the European Parliament's Turkey delegation, visiting the nearby southeastern city of Diyarbakir, said the killings would send a negative message to Europe and that there was paranoia about missionaries in Turkey.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion