Three murdered at Turkish bible publishing house : Nick Birch in Istanbul

April 19, 2007 The Guardian

Two Turkish Christian converts and a German man were killed yesterday in a publishing house that prints bibles, in the latest attack on religious minorities living in Turkey. Security officials found the men with their hands and feet tied to chairs and their throats cut in the office of Zirve Publishing, in the south-eastern city of Malatya. A fourth man was being treated for severe head injuries after he jumped from a third-floor balcony to escape, while another sustained stab wounds.

Officials said that four men had been taken into custody. Turkish media reported that the police arrested the attackers before they left the publisher's office, acting on a tip-off from victims' families who had been unable to reach the men by phone for days. Ahmet Guvener, the pastor of a Protestant church in the nearby city of Diyarbakir and a friend of the victims, said he had talked to the men on Tuesday night. "They were at peace with the world. This news came as a total shock," he said. Zirve's director, Hamza Ozant, who opened the Malatya office last year, said the men had been on the verge of asking for police protection, following threats which they had experienced. The attack comes two months after a nationalist gunman killed the journalist Hrant Dink in a street in Istanbul. The 52-year-old was a native of Malatya, and a Turkish-Armenian. He had been editor-in-chief of the bilingual Turkish-Armenian newspaper Agos.
Malatya, the home town of Mehmet Ali Agca, who shot and wounded Pope John Paul II in 1981, is known as a nationalist city. Nationalists had protested outside the Zirve building following local news reports accusing them of proselytism. In 2005 molotov cocktails thrown at the International Protestant church in Ankara caused £5,000 damage. And last year an American missionary in the south-eastern city of Gaziantep was bound and gagged by two assailants claiming to be members of al-Qaida. Although they did not kill him, the attackers promised to come back and finish him off unless he and his family left Turkey immediately.