Three Christians murdered in Turkish city

All Financial Times NewsThree people, including a German citizen, were killed in a savage attack on a Turkish publishing company with ties to the country's Christian community, in the latest in a series of bloody assaults on its tiny religious minorities.

Separately, in a development that could inflame Turkey's simmering ethnic tensions still further, four police officers were acquitted of any wrongdoing in the shooting deaths of a 12-year-old Kurdish boy and his father in 2004. The incident caused anguish in the country and attracted the attention of international human rights activists.

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Both developments highlight the precarious nature of religious and other minority freedoms in Turkey, which is 99 per cent Muslim and prone to chauvinistic nationalism. They follow the murder in January of Hrant Dink, a prominent Turkish-Armenian journalist, and coincide with continuing unrest and separatist feeling in the Kurdish provinces in the east and southeast.

The attack on the Zirve publishing house, which reportedly was involved in distributing bibles, occurred in Malatya, a city of about 1m in eastern Turkey. The three victims were found with their hands and feet bound and with their throats cut in an assault that bore hallmarks of the attacks carried out by Islamist extremists. The German embassy in Ankara said one of the victims was a German citizen.

Four people were being questioned about the incident late on Wednesday, and Turkish television reported that a link was being investigated to an organisation called Turkish Hezbollah, which seeks to establish an Islamist state in Kurdish Turkey.

Any motive for the attack, the worst on a Christian target for many years, was not clear. But Malatya has an unusual history that would give the incident some context. It used to be home to a large community of Armenian Christians. Most of them fled or were massacred as the Ottoman empire collapsed during the first world war.

Since then its population has become a mix of Turks and ethnic Kurds. Both communities identify their separate and often warring nationalisms with Islam. Malatya is the hometown of Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turkish man who shot Pope John Paul II in 1981, and of Mr Dink.

The four police officers were acquitted of all charges relating to the murders of Ahmet Kaymaz and his son Ugur in Kiziltepe, a Kurdish village close to Turkey's border with Syria. The case was seen as a test of Turkey's willingness to hold its security forces to account in the decades-old war between the Turkish state and Kurdish separatism.

A judge at the trial found on Wednesday that the officers acted in self-defence. Murat Yapmaz, an uncle of the dead boy, said in a telephone interview that the family felt it had not got justice.

"We will never accept this decision. It is very bad for Turkey," he said.

Copyright 2007 Financial Times