A Turkish prosecutor accused Iran Tuesday of providing military training and weapons to Turkish Islamic radicals charged with murdering four pro-secular intellectuals in a bid to undermine Turkey's strictly secular order, Anatolia news agency reported.
The accusations came in an indictment by a state security court prosecutor demanding the death sentence for nine men accused of carrying out deadly attacks within a campaign to overthrow the constitutional order and replace it with an Iranian-style hardline Islamic state.
A group within Iran's Revolutionary Guards, the Jerusalem Army, which works to export the Islamic revolution to neighboring countries, and Iran's intelligence organization Sawama trained Turkish radicals in military camps in Iran, according to the indictment.
It said the suspects, organized under the umbrella of the pro-Islamist Selam newspaper and Tevhid magazine, acted as the Jerusalem Army's instrument in Turkey.
"The organization provided their elements in Turkey with weapons and ammunition," through couriers or international arms traffickers, prosecutor Hamza Keles said, according to Anatolia.
The Turkish militants helped Iranian agents in slaying or kidnapping Iranian dissidents, who fled to Turkey after the 1979 Islamic revolution.
The so-called Selam and Tevhid groups had close contacts with another extreme Muslim organization, the Turkish Hizbullah, which authorities hold responsible for some 600 murders.
Tuesday's indictment demanded the death sentence for Ferhan Ozmen, who had confessed to gunning down scholar Muammer Aksoy and sending a deadly letter bomb to pro-secular theologist Bahriye Ucok in 1990.
Ozmen, along with two other suspects, Necdet Yuksel and Oguz Demir, perpetrated the fatal bomb attack on leading journalist and writer Ugur Mumcu in 1993, according to the prosecution.
Yuksel, together with Rustu Aytufan, planted a bomb, made by Ozmen, in the car of Ahmet Taner Kislali, a prominent writer and former culture minister, in October 1999.
Demir and Aytufan were not charged in Tuesday's indictment as prosecutor Keles said it was the outcome of only one part of the ongoing investigation against the Tevhid and Selam groups.
Ozmen and Yukse, along with the other seven suspects facing the death penalty, had been involved in a series of other violent acts, according to the indictment, which also demanded jail terms of up to 22 years and six months for eight other defendants.
Relations between Ankara and Tehran became strained in May after police launched massive arrests of suspected Islamic militants and the Turkish press singled out Iran as the mastermind of the four killings.
Tehran has categorically denied the charges.
But Turkish Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit said in May that "some separatist groups in Turkey and others exploiting religion have benefitted from Iran's hospitality or have used for themselves its tendency to export the revolution." - ANKARA (AFP)
© 2000 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
