Vermoorde christenen in Turkije werden drie uur lang gefolterd

[Marsipulami]

Vaticaan noemt moord waanzinnige daad

Slachtoffers christelijke uitgeverij Turkije gemarteld


MALATYA (RKnieuws.net) - De drie protestanten die woensdag zijn vermoord in een christelijke uitgeverij in Malatya in het zuidoosten van Turkije, zijn voordat hun kelen werden doorgesneden drie uur lang gemarteld. Dit meldden Turkse media vrijdag, aldus het ANP.
Volgens een woordvoerder van het ziekenhuis waar de drie in eerste instantie naar toe zijn gebracht had een slachtoffer over zijn hele lichaam messteken en waren er vingers afgesneden. Ook de andere twee vertoonden sporen van marteling.

Onder de slachtoffers was een in Turkije woonachtige 46-jarige Duitser die vrijdag in het bijzijn van honderden mensen, onder wie zijn vrouw en kinderen, is begraven. De weduwe zei dat zij geen wraakgevoelens koestert jegens de daders. Het Vaticaan noemde de moord eerder van een waanzinnige daad.

In totaal zijn tien mensen opgepakt in verband met de moorden. De vijf hoofdverdachten zouden lid zijn van een fanatieke islamitische groepering. Kranten hebben de gebeurtenissen in Malatya gekoppeld aan andere recente aanvallen tegen minderheden in Turkije, waaronder de moord op de Turks-Armeense journalist Hrant Dink in januari.

[TonH]

Hoe barbaars blijkt wel uit het volgende:

"The brutality of the Malatya attack shocked the nation as Dr Murat Ugras, a spokesman for the Turgut Ozal Medical Center, told the daily Hurriyet how hospital surgeons strived without success to save Ugur Yuksel, one of the three victims of the massacre.

“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, a pastor of Malatya’s tiny Protestant community, and German Tilmann Geske, a Malatya resident along 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 Guanidin, 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."

Kathimerini, 21/4/07

[TonH]

Verontrustend is dat de daders steeds jongeren zijn...



The Islamic fundamentalist who killed the Catholic priest Andrea Santoro in Trabzon, Turkey, in February 2006 was a minor. The killer of Armenian editor Hrant Dink in Istanbul a few months ago was also a minor. It was five minors who on Wednesday slit the throats of three people in a Christian publishing house in Malatya, southeastern Turkey.

Wednesday’s repulsive act of violence once again raised many unsettling questions. Why is there such a widespread lack of tolerance of followers of minority religions? How is it possible for such violent hatred to burn in such young hearts?

These are young people who, though perhaps not poor and illiterate, certainly lack hope and ambition and can see no further than the limits of their narrow worlds; these are adolescents who have been brainwashed during their childhood, divided between political and religious pressures and a strict society, on the one hand, and the globalized teenage world of cell phones and Internet cafes on the other. Inextricably intertwined by the tentacles of religion, these youths seek to reach saintly status through the murder of an “infidel” in the name of God.

Religion ostensibly explains, counsels, comforts and inspires. But religion can also “arm” its followers by granting them an intransigent sense of what is right. These people have only one God – and infidels have no place in their world.

These fundamentalists share a warped version of collectivity: They believe they exist in order to raze anything that does not fit in with the holy dogma.

All dogmas – Protestantism, Roman Catholicism, Zionism, Orthodoxy – have islets of fundamentalism and aggressive anti-modernism within them. We cannot say that all of Islam is characterized by Jihad. Not all Muslims believe that they are fighting a holy war. Islam is one thing, fundamental Islamism quite another. Islam today is experiencing what the Christians went through for centuries. The Christians abolished the Holy Inquisition and death by fire. They modernized religion.

Islam has tried, but failed, to adopt the Western model, which is the basic reason for a series of distortions.

So how can fundamentalism be tackled? By curbing inequalities through education, through the creation of institutions that defend religious freedoms, through justice and through a sturdy democracy.

The West can help achieve these goals – the West, which has not contributed to the democratization of Islam until now as it has been too busy dealing with despotic regimes. It has allowed moderate Islam to wither and has exported disaster and brute force.

The point is that violence breeds more violence. It does not reduce religious bigotry, which will only be curbed if its roots are cut and if true dialogue between cultures begins.

Kathimerini, 21/4/2007