Christians die in Turkey

I was recently informed of deaths in Turkey last Wednesday. it behoves us to pray earnestly for Christians in Turkey. According to a Reuters news agency report from Istanbul

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, a city in the southeast of the country.
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."
It linked the new attack with the murders of Turkish-Armenian editor Hrant Dink in January and an Italian priest last year.

[In February 2006, a Turkish teenager shot a Roman Catholic priest to death as he prayed in his church, and two other priests were attacked later that year.]

Custody
Malatya Governor Halil Ebrahim 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.
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 said.
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.

Another report says

The Zirve publishing house, whose name means "Summit," had previously been the target of ultranationalist protests and threats. Turkish television showed footage of one such demonstration in Malatya in 2005, in which the mostly youthful marchers chanted slogans denouncing Christian evangelism. "There has been a mood against Christian missionaries for a long time, despite the tradition of tolerance in the old Ottoman Empire," said Mustafa Akyol, a Turkish columnist and analyst who writes often on interfaith issues. "Turkey is becoming an insecure place for minorities in general."

Other reports say that the three victims - a German and two Turkish citizens - were found with their hands and legs bound and their throats slit at the publishing house. Police went to the scene after receiving calls about a fight.

The German and one of the Turkish victims were found dead, and the third victim died in a hospital, Malatya Governor Halil İbrahim Daşöz said.

One of the victims, Ugur Yuksel, was buried according to Muslim rites on Thursday in a village near Elazig in eastern Turkey. Newspapers described the other victim, Necati Aydin, as the head of the tiny Christian community in Malatya. (His widow is shown above). He was arrested for selling Bibles and accused of insulting Islam seven years ago in İzmir, but acquitted due to the testimonies of witnesses saying that he only gave the Bible to them and did not mention anything about Islam. he will be buried in Izmir tomorrow.

The German man is called Tilmann Geske. He was 46 and had been living in Malatya since 2003. His widow, Susanne Geske, has said that she wanted her husband to be buried in Malatya. She also noted that she loved Malatya and wanted to stay there. A felow worker described Tilmann as 'a slender German man who never wasted a sentence when a word would suffice'.

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 European Union 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.

In Diyarbakir, there was growing concern in the 50-strong Protestant community, whose church was damaged in an arson attack three years ago. `We have not been threatened as yet but as Christians in Turkey we are subject to pressure psychologically and from the media and after this incident we are more uneasy,' said Ali Is, who works in the Diyarbakir church.