MALATYA, Turkey -- Three Protestants murdered at a Christian publishing house in Malatya, Turkey, were tortured for three hours before their assailants slit their throats, a press report said Friday, quoting one of the doctors involved in the grisly case.
Dr. Murat Ugras, a spokesman for the Turgut Ozal Medical center, told the daily Hurriyet of hospital surgeons' fruitless efforts to save Ugur Yuksel, one of the three victims of the massacre at the Zirve (summit) publishing house, which distributed Christian literature. "He had scores of knife cuts on his thighs, his testicles, his rectum, and his back," Ugras said. "His fingers were sliced to the bone. It is obvious that these wounds had been inflicted to torture him," he said.
The two others who were killed, Necati Aydin, pastor of Malatya's tiny Protestant community, and German Tilmann Geske, a Malatya resident with his wife and three children since 2003, were also tortured, press reports said. The abuse lasted for three hours as the five men detained at the crime scene interrogated the three on their missionary activities, they said. "We tied their hands and feet and later gagged them," the mass daily Sabah quoted one of the suspects as telling police. "Emre slit their throats," said the youth, who was not named, referring to Emre Gunaydin, the alleged leader of the gang, who is at the same hospital in serious condition after jumping out of the publishers' third floor office in a bid to flee police. Gunaydin, 19, had reportedly made several visits beforehand to the publishing house to gain the confidence of the people working there, newspapers said.
The daily Radikal said that the German was the first to die and the two Turks were slaughtered only when police arrived at the door after receiving a call from a member of the Protestant community who grew suspicious when he found the office door locked.
Proselytizing is not banned in Muslim, secular Turkey, but is generally viewed with suspicion. Newspapers linked the Malatya massacre to other recent attacks against minorities in Turkey, including the murder last year in Trabzon of Italian Catholic priest Andrea Santoro and the assassination in Istanbul in January of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink.
The reports said that the killers were believed to be members of a cell of nationalist-Islamist fanatics recently set up in Malatya and similar to one based in Trabzon that has been blamed for the Dink murder. Newspapers also said that three of the five main suspects - police have detained 10 people in all - were taken into custody two days before the killings for shooting air guns in an empty lot, but were released after paying a fine.
Geske's wife Suzanna, meanwhile, told a television channel that she "forgives" her husband's killers and that she intends to stay on in Malatya, where her husband will be buried.
Interesting the writer had to put scare quotes on forgives.
The killings shocked Turkey and were strongly condemned by the international community, prompting Germany, which holds the rotating presidency of the European Union Turkey is seeking to join, to call on Ankara to take greater measures to protect religious freedoms.