Back in April, I noted the brutal murders of three Christians who worked at a Bible publishing house in Turkey who had their throats slit by vengeful Muslims. The alleged killers exulted: “Let this be a lesson to the enemies of our religion.” The trial of the five accused murders began last month, but is dragging on. Now, Turkish media outlets are reporting on a chilling possible connection between the defendants and the police:

Turkey has launched an investigation into alleged collusion between police officers and at least one of the suspects charged with killing three Christians earlier this year at a publishing house that produces Bibles, an official said Saturday.

Two senior police inspectors will be assigned to investigate whether any officers provided assistance to the suspects, an Interior Ministry official said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media. He did not provide further details.

The three Christians – a German and two Turks – were killed in the southern city of Malatya on April 18. The killings – in which the victims were tied up and had their throats slit – drew international condemnation and added to Western concerns about whether Turkey can protect its religious minorities.

Five people were arrested and charged with murder. The trial opened last month, but was quickly adjourned until Jan. 14 because defence lawyers requested more time to prepare their arguments.

The Interior Ministry decided to open an investigation after several newspapers published stories Saturday alleging co-operation between police and at least one of the suspects.

Radikal newspaper quoted two of the suspects, Abuzer Yildirim and Salih Guler, as saying in their testimonies that a third suspect Emre Gunaydin told them that he had met with police officials and learned about the locations of Christian churches in the city.

“I asked him who are the police chiefs that you are speaking to, he said: ‘Don’t ask, take it easy,”‘ Radikal quoted Yildirim as saying.

CBN aired a report on the murdered Christians–two Turkish converts who left Islam and one German national–over the summer. Watch and remember what true religious martyrs look like:

Turkey’s prime minister pledged to work toward national unity and fight terrorism after the Islamic-rooted ruling party won parliamentary elections by a wide margin.

Although the ruling party’s success has been touted as proof that Islam and democracy can coexist, the new government is likely to face persistent tension over the role of Islam in society.

State-run Anatolia news agency was projecting that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party would win 340 of the 550 seats, as votes in all but six of more than 158,000 ballot boxes across the country were counted.

Erdogan, a devout Muslim, pledged to safeguard the country’s secular traditions and do whatever the government deems necessary to fight separatist Kurdish rebels.

“We will never make concessions over the values of people, the basic principles of our republic. This is our promise. We will embrace Turkey as a whole without discriminating,” he said at a rally in the capital, Ankara.

Update: 1:19pm Eastern. Election results coming in…

Turkey’s Islamic-rooted ruling party was headed for victory Sunday with more than half the votes counted in parliamentary elections that pitted the government against opponents warning of a threat to secular traditions.

With 56 percent of votes counted, the ruling Justice and Development Party won 48.5 percent and two secular opposition parties had 18.8 percent and 14.7 percent respectively, according to results on television news channels.

CNN-Turk television predicted that the ruling party would secure a majority of 334 seats in the 550-member Parliament after all the votes were counted. It based its projection on a survey of 400 polling stations.

“We are doing very well throughout Turkey,” said Nevzat Cetinkaya, deputy chairman of the ruling party.

***
Turkey is holding parliamentary elections today. The importance of the vote there can’t be emphasized enough. The choice in the minds of many Turks is this: sharia or secularism? East or West? Submission or resistance? A battle over Muslim headscarves prompted the elections:

A general election on Sunday in this mostly Muslim nation might help answer a divisive question: whether women should be allowed to wear head scarves in official settings and state institutions.

It was a tempest over a head scarf that helped trigger the elections in the first place. Secularists reacted with outrage when the Islamic-oriented ruling party proposed a presidential candidate whose wife covered her head.

The opposition boycotted the presidential vote in Parliament and secularists held massive rallies in several cities to protest the nomination of Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul.

A key element of the opposition’s position was that it would be a disgrace for a headscarf-clad first lady to live in the mansion once occupied by Turkey’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk — who established the modern secular state from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire. The government was eventually forced to withdraw Gul’s candidacy and called the July elections.

The ban imposed on Islamic-style headscarf is a long running problem that has increasingly dominated the agenda here, in parallel to the rise of the country’s political Islamic movement.

In 1999, Huda Kaya and her two daughters were accused in court of “attempting to forcefully dissolve the Turkish Republic,” a charge carrying a possible death sentence at the time.

Their alleged crime? Like thousands of others, they had participated in a rally against a government ban on wearing Islamic headscarves in universities.

Michael Rubin posts a backgrounder here.

See also: Robert Spencer’s May Jihad Watch video, “Can Turkey resist Islamification?”

The WSJ looks at the Turkish Test.

Update: It has been a “largely peaceful” election process, but there have been outbreaks of violence at polling places throughout the country. A glimpse:

The Anatolia news agency reports scuffles between rival party workers have left two people slightly injured in Demre, a tourist haven in southern Turkey.

A row erupted between supporters of the right-wing Nationalist Action Party (MHP) and the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) over claims AKP workers had dumped leaflets on the streets, breaching an election day campaign ban.

Both sides have pressed charges.

Officials in the mainly Kurdish south-eastern province of Diyarbakir say three men were also injured when two groups attacked each other with knives and sticks during voting at a polling station in Bismil.

Anatolia says one of the men was badly wounded.

In the village of Buyukakoren, also in Diyarbakir, villagers and rival party workers fought after a man tried to help his illiterate wife to vote inside the polling booth.

Officials say three villagers sustained knife wounds and another three suffered head injuries from flying stones and sticks.

Anatolia also reports six men were hurt when a political discussion at a coffee house erupted into a free-for-all in Sason, in the eastern province Batman.

Barry Rubin reports from Istanbul.

Robert Spencer notes the whitewashing of those who have attacked the publishing house in the past. They’re…“nationalists.”

A Turkish court on Tuesday acquitted a writer of insulting the country’s founder amid calls from the European Union to change repressive laws curbing freedom of expression.

Ipek Calislar had been charged with the crime of insulting Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in a biography. It was the latest of dozens of trials in Turkey against authors, journalists, publishers and scholars, including Nobel literature laureate Orhan Pamuk.

The charges were brought after Calislar published a biography of the revered leader’s wife that claimed that Ataturk fled an assassination attempt dressed in women’s clothing.

The book was the first comprehensive biography of Latife Ussaki, who was married to Ataturk for about two years until he divorced her in 1925.

Insulting Ataturk is a crime in Turkey, as are insults to the Turkish republic or the Turkish national character.

Unfortunately, the law still stands and the aggrieved will soon find another target.

He began his first visit to a Muslim country Tuesday with a message of dialogue and “brotherhood” between faiths, and Turkey’s chief Islamic cleric said at a joint appearance that growing “Islamophobia” hurts all Muslims…

… The pope is expected to call for greater rights and protections for Christian minorities in the Muslim world, including the tiny Greek Orthodox community in Turkey.

Benedict, seeking to ease anger over his perceived criticism of Islam, met with Ali Bardakoglu, chief of Turkey’s Religious Affairs Directories.

“The so-called conviction that the sword is used to expand Islam in the world and growing Islamophobia hurts all Muslims,” Bardakoglu said at a joint appearance.

Maybe if Muslims stopped using swords and bombs and guns in the name of Islam, and if more Muslims stopped embracing violent jihad, and if more Muslims urged others to renounce jihadism without having to risk reprisals and their own lives, the self-inflicted wound would start to heal.

Robert Spencer zeroes in on Muslim intolerance in Turkey:

Unfortunately, the danger of and anger over the Pope’s visit to Turkey has overshadowed both the real focus of the visit, and what should be its major preoccupation. The main purpose of the Pope’s trip is to meet with the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, spiritual leader of the Orthodox Church. One may hope also that the Pope will take an opportunity to shed some light upon the woeful condition of religious minorities, principally Christians, in what is nominally a secular state that allows for religious freedom. Two converts from Islam to Christianity, Hakan Tastan and Turan Topal, are currently on trial on charges of “insulting ‘Turkishness’” and inciting hatred of Islam. What seems to be behind the charges is that Tastan and Topal were proselytizing – which, while not officially illegal, is frowned upon and has sometimes resulted in beatings of Christians trying to hand out religious literature. On November 4, a Protestant church in western Turkey was firebombed, after months of harassment that was ignored by Turkish authorities. The murderer of a Catholic priest, Fr. Andrea Santoro, last February in the Turkish city of Trabzon was recently sentenced to only eighteen years in prison. (The killer shouted “Allahu akbar!” as he fired shots at the priest.)

All this bespeaks a Turkish officialdom that is hostile – at best – to non-Muslim forms of religious expression, Turkey’s guarantees of religious freedom be damned. The institutionalized subjugation and second-class status of religious minorities under the Ottoman Empire was bad enough, but Turkish secularism has been, if anything, even worse. Constantinople was 50% Christian as recently as 1914 (its name was changed to Istanbul in 1930); today, it is less than one percent Christian. The Catholic Church has no legal recognition; Catholic churches, like other churches, remain inconspicuous so as not to draw the angry attention of mujahedin. Even the recognized Churches are not allowed to operated seminaries or build new houses of worship – in accord with ancient Islamic Sharia restrictions on non-Muslims in an Islamic state, which restrictions paradoxically enough still have at least some force in secular Turkey.

The righteous fury with which the Pope will likely be greeted in Turkey will shift attention from the shame Turkish authorities should feel over the mistreatment of Christians in their land that nominally allows for religious freedom. The mainstream media will focus on protests against the Pope, and pay scant attention to anything he may say, if he says anything at all, about the oppression of Christians in Turkey. And that, in the final analysis, may lead the Turkish government – for all its security precautions — to hope that the protestors will turn out in force.

***

Jim Geraghty is blogging in Turkey and spots the Pope’s motorcade.

Also blogging in Turkey: Josh Trevino.

And here’s more on the Christian converts on trial for–yup–”insulting Islam:”

Hakan Tastan, 37, and Turan Topal, 46, are accused of making the insults and of inciting hate while allegedly trying to convert other Turks to Christianity. If convicted, the two Turkish men could face up to nine years in prison.

The men were charged under Turkey’s Article 301, which has been used to bring charges against dozens of intellectuals — including Nobel Prize-winner Orhan Pamuk.

The law has widely been condemned for severely limiting free expression and European officials have demanded Turkey change it as part of reforms to join the EU.

They also are charged under a law against inciting hatred based on religion.

Prosecutors accuse the two of allegedly telling possible converts that Islam was “a primitive and fabricated” religion and that Turks would remain “barbarians” as long they continued practicing Islam, Anatolia reported.

The prosecutors also accused them of speaking out against the country’s compulsory military service, and compiling databases on possible converts.

Tastan and Topal denied the accusations in court.

“I am a Turk, I am a Turkish citizen. I don’t accept the accusations of insulting ‘Turkishness,’” Anatolia quoted Tastan as telling the court. “I am a Christian, that’s true. I explain the Bible … to people who want to learn. I am innocent.”

***

Previous:

Pope will visit Turkey
Report: Another victim of Pope Rage
Remembering Sister Leonella
This is what a real martyr looks like
It’s always Code Red for the jihadists
Report: Catholic priest missing in Iraq; London jihadis: “Pope Benedict watch your back”
The Pope’s e-mail address
Sister Leonella Sgorbati, RIP
Italian nun killed, Pope sorry for Muslim reaction
The Religion of Firebombs and Fatwas
Pope Rage on the Internet; church bombings in Gaza
I support the Pope
Oriana Fallaci, RIP, and the Religion of Perpetual Outrage

About 12,000 Turkish secularists marched in the capital on Saturday to protest against what they see as a rising Islamist influence under Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan’s government, Anatolian news agency said.

The demonstrators, who represented 112 non-governmental organisations, shouted “Turkey is secular, will remain secular” and “Independent Turkey” and protested against Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP), which has roots in political Islam.

Overwhelmingly Muslim, Turkey is governed by secular laws that separate religion and state.

Since winning 2002 elections, Erdogan’s government has alarmed secularists by promoting an increase of religious schools, seeking to lift a ban on wearing Islamic headscarves in universities and government offices and filling senior government posts with Islamists.

Meanwhile, in Germany, a priest makes a dramatic statement, via the Times of London:

A retired priest committed suicide by setting himself on fire in a German monastery in protest at the spread of Islam and the Protestant Church’s inability to contain it.

Roland Weisselberg, 73, poured a can of petrol over his head and set light to himself in the grounds of the Augustine monastery in the eastern city of Erfurt, where Martin Luther spent six years as a monk at the beginning of the 16th century.

Witnesses said that Weisselberg climbed into a building site next to the monastery church, where a Reformation Day service was being held. He shouted “Jesus and Oskar” before the flames engulfed him. The latter name was an apparent reference to Oskar Brüsewitz, a priest who burnt himself in 1976 in protest against the Communist regime in East Germany. Monastery staff tried to put out the flames and Weisselberg was still conscious as a nun prayed with him before he was taken to hospital. He died a day later, on Wednesday.

Media reports said that he had tried to kill himself inside the church but changed his mind when he found the side door was locked.

The Provost of Erfurt, Elfriede Begrich, told reporters that Weisselberg’s widow had said that he killed himself because he was alarmed at the spread of Islam and the Church’s stance on the issue.

She described Weisselberg as an erudite man who had addressed repeatedly the Church’s position on Islam in meetings over the past three to four years. He had written to her, urging her to take the matter more seriously, she said.

Closer to home, Fox News airs the first half of the documentary, “Obsession: The Threat of Radical Islam.” The trailer is here in case you missed it.

Maybe it’s not too late.

Ten Britons have been injured after three explosions hit a holiday resort in Turkey, the Foreign Office has said.

The blasts happened in the past few hours at the coastal resort of Marmaris. At least one appeared to be on a bus, witnesses said.

All ten injured Britons are in hospital with three in a serious condition.

Six people have also been injured in Istanbul after a bomb exploded late on Sunday night, the Anatolia news agency reported.

Update: Total up to 22 injured. ABC News:

Kurdish separatists, leftists and Islamic militants have carried out bomb attacks in Turkey in the past. The tourist industry is a powerful motor of the Turkish economy.

The explosions come two days after two bombs exploded in the southern Turkish city of Adana, injuring four people.

BOMBING OF TURKISH RIOT POLICE IN ISTANBUL

Crap.

CNN: “The blast took place at an Internet cafe frequented by police officers from the nearby local headquarters of Istanbul’s riot police.”

Three guesses as to what the local riot police have been doing lately.

Turkish television is showing injured bomb victims arriving at the hospital. Some of ‘em are just kids, or early teens. Wire services are reporting four injured.

By the way, today’s Turkish Daily News: “Protests spread across Turkey as concerns rise that bigger demonstrations may be in the offing as Friday prayers approach.”

UPDATE: SkyTurk just said 14 injured.

Jim e-mails that it’s an “ominous sign – somebody put a bomb in an Istanbul cafe frequently used by their riot cops. Yeah, the same riot cops protecting the Danish consulate there a few days ago. Sure looks to me like somebody’s trying to send a message: ‘Don’t prevent us from reaching the Consulate next time.’ By the way, tomorrow’s the day of prayer. I’d bet a kebab there’s another big protest/rally aimed at the consulate tomorrow (and maybe the embassy here in Ankara).”

Stay tuned to Jim’s blog, TKS, for more.

Reuters reports:

Istanbul’s police chief said a bomb blast on Thursday at an Internet cafe in the city had wounded 14 people.

Police had said earlier that it was a gas explosion.

“It’s a bomb explosion, there are 14 injured. One of them is seriously injured,” Celalettin Cerrah told reporters after visiting the Internet cafe where the blast occurred. Six of the injured were police officers, he said.

The blast rocked the Bayrampasa district, not far from the airport on the European side of Turkey’s largest city.

Militant Islamists carried out a series of devastating explosions in Istanbul in November 2003 that targeted British and Jewish sites and killed more than 60 people.

Other radical groups including Kurdish separatists also operate in Turkey and have in the past carried out violent attacks on both civilian and military targets.

I noted the murder of Italian Catholic priest Andrea Santoro over the weekend and followed up yesterday with news that a witness heard the alleged murderer shout “Allah Akbar.”

Now, a culprit has been caught. And the motive is reportedly–you guessed it–the Muhammad Cartoons:

Turkish security forces arrested a high school student on Tuesday over the killing of an Italian Catholic priest and Turkish television said the teenager had confessed to a crime which has shocked this Muslim nation.

The student told police he was influenced by cartoons lampooning the Prophet Mohammad, NTV commercial television said. The report could not be immediately confirmed.

The state Anatolian news agency said the student, aged 16, had been carrying a 9 mm pistol when he was captured in the Black Sea city of Trabzon, where Andrea Santoro, 61, was gunned down on Sunday while praying.

…Turkey, with a population of 72 million, is overwhelmingly Muslim and its tiny Christian population is barely 60,000. Turkey has seen street protests against the cartoons, but they have been peaceful, in contrast to some Muslim countries…

The Vatican responds:

Pope Benedict XVI said Monday that he hoped the blood shed by a Roman Catholic priest slain in Turkey over the weekend would become the “seeds of hope” to build a lasting fraternity between peoples.

Benedict sent telegrams of condolences to church authorities in Italy and Turkey following the killing Sunday of the Rev. Andrea Santoro, 60, who was shot as he prayed in his church in the Black Sea port city of Trabzon, where he was the parish priest for a small Christian community.

…Benedict said he hoped “that the blood that he shed will become the seeds of hope for building an authentic fraternity among peoples.”

Say a prayer for Father Santoro, a man of God and a man of peace.

***

Rak/Aki: Bishop fears more violence after priest’s murder

A volunteer in Turkey remembers Father Santoro:

It was Sunday and I had just finished teaching catechism to the 12 children of our parish here in Antakya, the ancient Antioch, in southern Turkey, when Father Domenico stopped me in the garden and told me that the bishop just rang. “Father Andrea has just been shot dead less than an hour ago.” Father Andrea Santoro! I can’t believe it.

He was a man full of determination and earnestness. Although I met him only a few times, for brief moments, when we did meet, our interaction was always intense, straightforward, centred on God, His Word, and Jesus Christ.

I was told that he had been in Turkey in 1993 when he stopped in Antioch for about 20 days (see photo). That was his first pilgrimage to the place he liked to call “the great land where God chose to speak to mankind in a special way.” And it was in the city where the followers of Jesus were first called Christians that he wanted to perform spiritual exercises alone…

…Like a nail embedded in his flesh, his fascination for the land never left him. In the country, he found “riches and means to enlighten our western world thanks to the light that God always cast on it.” But he also found that the Middle East had its own dark corners, its often tragic problems, its emptiness. And for this, it needed that the Gospel that came from there should return there once again, and that the presence of Christ that once was there, be renewed there. Since then, he asked his superiors to let him go back as fidei donum…

…He told me that his presence in “Urfa (and in Abraham’s village of Haran 45 kilometres away) always echoed what God told Abraham: ‘Leave your country, your people, and your father’s household and go to the land I will show you . . . and I will bless you . . . And all peoples on earth”.

Urfa, he said, is every day’s “beginning”. Urfa is God who with an intelligence, power and love greater than our own expressed his plans to us, asking us to be at his service. Urfa is the power of the boundless blessing, joy and fruitfulness that God guarantees. Urfa is the root and compass to know where to go in Turkey and the Middle East.

This city remained in his heart even when he was asked to go to Trabzon on the Black Sea to serve at Saint Mary’s parish church (founded centuries ago by Capuchin Fathers) which had been left vacant for more than three years.

Trabzon is a city of some 200,000 people. It has many mosques, but only one church serving a Catholic congregation of 15 people. It has a larger Orthodox community spread across the city and many women from Eastern Europe working in the sex trade. It also sees many young Muslims drawn to the church.

“Here, there is a world dear to God,” Father Andrea wrote in his newsletter Finestra per il Medio Oriente (Window on the Middle East) right after his arrival in Trabzon. The purpose of the publication, which eventually went online, was to “gather from this land the many riches God gave it and send from there to here the riches God created over time, so that we can interact with each other on human, spiritual, cultural and religious levels, enriching each other’s life, and counter the hatred, threats and war that are too often visible on the horizon.”

This was always his goal. “Open a window that would allow Western and Eastern Churches to exchange gifts, rediscover the sap that flows from the Jewish roots into the Christian tree, encourage a genuine and respectful dialogue between Christianity and Islam, and enable him to bear witness with his life and feelings, above all through prayer, the study of the Holy scriptures, friendships based on listening, talking, simplicity, his sincere believing and the way he lived.”