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Iran accused of aiding Islamist violence in Turkey: report |
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Sunday, 18 December 2005 |
ANKARA (AFP) - A Turkish court has said that neighboring Iran
trained Turkish Islamist radicals and supported "terrorist" activities
aimed at undermining Turkey's strictly secular order, media reports
said Sunday.
The accusations came in the reasoning that an Ankara court wrote over
the convictions in July of nine Islamist militants in a long-running
case over the murders of four prominent pro-secular intellectuals in
the 1990s.
"Terrorism, which is an instrument of Iran's foreign policy, has been
frequently used by this country against Turkey, whom it sees as a main
rival in the region," the court document said, according to the Radikal
newspaper.
"Small (Turkish) organizations with no following have attacked in the
name of Islam targets considered as strategic by Iran," it said.
The main suspect in the case, Ferhan Ozmen, went to Iran in 1988,
joined a group called the so-called Jerusalem Army and was trained in
using weapons and explosives and making bombs, Anatolia news agency
quoted the court as saying.
The prosecution had described the Jerusalem Army as a group within
Iran's Revolutionary Guards which works to export the 1979 Islamic
revolution to neighboring countries, when it indicted the suspects in
July 2000.
Ozmen was sentenced to life in July for "seeking to overthrow the
constitutional order by force and replace it with a state based on
religious rules."
He was held responsible for gunning down scholar Muammer Aksoy and
sending a deadly letter bomb to pro-secular theologist Bahriye Ucok in
1990, and for making the bombs that killed journalist Ugur Mumcu and
former culure minister Ahmet Taner Kislali in their cars in 1993 and
1999 respectively.
Eight other defendants -- all but one of whom were said to have spent
time in Iran -- received jail sentences of between three and 15 years
for belonging to and commanding outlawed groups.
The Iran-linked Tevhid Selam group, to which the convicts belonged, was
also behind the murders of two employees of the US and Saudi embassies
in Ankara, in 1991 and 1988 respectively, as well as several bomb
attacks on western and Jewish targets in Turkey, the court said.
After the police arrested the suspects and seized caches of weapons and
explosives in 2000, then Turkish prime minister Bulent Ecevit accused
Iran of aiding Turkish Islamist extremists and sheltering separatist
Kurdish rebels. Tehran categorically denied the charges.
After years of animosity, the two neighbors have moved to improve
relations in recent years, and Turkey has noted enhanced Iranian
cooperation on security issues. |
