Turkish Council of State shooting

 Turkish Council of State shooting

Press ID card found on Alparslan Arslan after the attack
Date	17 May 2006
Location	Ankara,  Turkey
Perpetrators	Ergenekon, Alparslan Arslan

The Turkish Council of State shooting occurred on 17 May 2006 when "lone gunman" Alparslan Arslan entered the Council of State building in Ankara and shot five judges, killing judge Mustafa Yücel Özbilgin. While the incident was tried fingered as the responsibility of the Islamist government of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in relation to a political fight over Islamic headscarfs, the real culprit was the deep state Ergenekon organization.

There were allegations that the attack was orchestrated by retired gendarmerie general Veli Küçük, who was detained in the Ergenekon investigation on conspiracy charges. Osman Yıldırım, one of those eventually convicted for the attack, said the decision to go ahead with the attack had been made at a meeting at an Istanbul apartment at which he and Arslan had met with Küçük. In 2008 the case was consolidated with that of the 2008 bombing of the newspaper Cumhuriyet, also allegedly connected to Ergenekon.

Official narrative

The attack took place around 9:45 am on the morning of May 17, 2006. A lawyer named Alparslan Arslan managed to pass through the security with his gun, thanks to his lawyer ID. After reaching the floor where the 2nd Department of the Council of State is located, he headed to the room of the head of the department, Mustafa Biri. Arslan was stopped at the door by the secretary, but entered through the open door because tea was being served, fired 11 shots at the members of the circle who were meeting inside, with a Glock gun in his hand. Tansel Çölaşan, Deputy Chairman of the Council of State, who was not in the room at the time of the attack, claimed that the attacker shot by saying "I am Allah's soldier, Allahu Akbar". This claim was denied by the members who were personally attacked and present in the room.

Judge Mustafa Özbilgin suffered a gunshot wound to the head and after six hours of surgery was pronounced dead later that day in a hospital in Ankara.

Arslan hit the members of the department, Mustafa Biri, Mustafa Yücel Özbilgin, Ayla Gönenç, Ayfer Özdemir and Ahmet Çobanoğlu. Member Kamuran Erbuğa escaped unharmed by getting under the table during the attack. The tea maker in the room was not injured either. Judge Mustafa Yücel Özbilgin suffered a gunshot wound to the head and after six hours of surgery was pronounced dead later that day in a hospital in Ankara.

Arslan, whose path was blocked by the police while trying to escape, was neutralized and caught.

Two janitors at the Court later said they had seen Arslan at the Court the day before and considered his behaviour suspicious enough to report it to the police.

The gun was supplied by İbrahim Şahin.

Reaction

The day after the attack, a large group gathered in Ankara to protest the attack, visited Anıtkabir and later attended Yücel Özbilgin's funeral. Özbilgin's mass funeral saw protestors calling Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan a "murderer" and demanding the government's resignation. In this crowd were members of the Constitutional Court of the Republic of Turkey, the Council of State, the Court of Cassation, the Court of Accounts, the Military Court of Cassation and the Supreme Military Administrative Court and the Union of Turkish Bar Association. sThere were representatives of the bar associations of 30 provinces, prosecutors, rectors, and academics. In the statement made in Anıtkabir, signed by the Supreme Court and the Council of State, it was claimed that the Tayyip Erdoğan government and Vakit Newspaper were responsible for the attack.

Prime Minister Erdoğan described the funeral as "a move aimed at fanning unrest in the country", while the Chief of the General Staff of the Republic of Turkey, General Hilmi Özkök, said that the protests should "not remain the reaction of just one day, a one-off event. ... It must gain permanence, as something continuous. It must be pursued by everyone." Erdoğan also said that "We should all make efforts to strengthen democracy, secularism ... and the rule of law."

Arslan later apologised to two of the judges he had wounded, saying that one had voted against the headscarf ban while the other had not been involved in the decision.

Investigation

Two days after the attack, Deputy Prime Minister Abdullah Gül announced that the ringleader of the gang who directed Alparslan Aslan was retired captain Muzaffer Tekin and stated that Tekin had frequent phone calls with Arslan before the incident. Muzaffer Tekin, described by the manager and neighbors of the apartment where he lives, as "his national feelings are strong, but his religion is not whole", left the building with his wife Müge at around 12:00 on the day of the attack and disappeared for a few days. Muzaffer Tekin was caught trying to commit suicide with a knife three days after the attack. Tekin was taken into custody by the police at Acıbadem Hospital, where he was taken to the ER. It was learned that Tekin was taken into technical follow-up right after the attack on the Council of State, and after leaving his home, he telephoned retired colonel Mehmet Zekeriya Öztürk and said, "I need to disappear for a few days, help me".

The newspaper Hürriyet announced on May 24, 2006 that the detained retired captain Muzaffer Tekin had connections to and pointed to people who were involved in the Ergenekon organization. However the police, who determined that Arslan and Tekin had an important relationship with people such as Veli Küçük, gangster boss Sedat Peker, Kemal Kerinçsiz, and Sevgi Erenerol, released Tekin because they could not reach any serious evidence. Muzaffer Tekin, Mehmet Zekeriya Öztürk in the indictment about the attack defendants were not included. It was argued that the defendants attempted to change the secular order and that the attack was carried out in response to the decisions taken by the 2nd Chamber of the Council of State about the headscarf.

On August 11, 2006, the first hearing of the case of the aggressor Alparslan Arslan and other people involved in the attack began at the 11th High Criminal Court in Ankara. Seven defendants, including Alparslan Arslan, were detained and the other defendants were tried for "attempting to change the constitutional order by force" and "forming an armed organization". Alparslan Arslan, who accepted the accusations against him at the first hearing; He said that he had attacked the Council of State because of its decision on the headscarf, and that he had attacked Cumhuriyet Newspaper for including a cartoon that compared headscarf wearers to pigs. [15]

On February 13, 2008, the court sentenced the defendants. The decision said the murder was carried out because of the hijab regulation. In addition, in the decision, it was argued that "there is no connection between the Ergenekon terrorist organization and the attack on the Council of State".

Arslan's father, İdris, made contradictory remarks on the matter. Initially he said his son was not religious and must have been coerced. One month later he defended his son's actions in the name of upholding the nation's values. Ergenekon prosecutors revealed that after the assassination, Arslan's mother and father had received 32,000 euros and $30,000, respectively.

An investigation by the Air Force Office of Special Investigations on stolen weaponry in Iraq revealed that the gun was of the same type used in shooting priest Andrea Santoro (whose attacker had shouted the same words).

Missing security footage

In April 2010, The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey said it was unable to retrieve security camera footage of the incident from the private security company OYAK, with footage missing from the day of the incident and the day before. In this report, it was stated that "there were no malfunctions in the hard disks on which the camera recordings were made, and that some of the images in the recordings containing the evening hours were later changed and deleted".

In line with the report from TÜBİTAK, a lawsuit was filed against 10 defendants, 6 of whom were imprisoned, including Orhan Çoban, the former OYAK company general manager, who was responsible for ensuring the security of the Council of State. In the indictment of the case; It was stated that the defendants intervened in the recording device installed by the OYAK Security company in the Council of State building and dismantled it on the date of the incident, and deleted the images irretrievably, and prevented the recording of the images on the day of the attack by not having a new device installed instead of the device that was removed before the attack. After the attack, the defendants also attended the meetings to obfuscate the evidence. In the communication report numbered 17136 included in the indictment, in the recording of a conversation between the two defendants; to the question of the one defendant "What did you do?", the reply was "We are trying, we are taking the images now, then we will blow them up, cut them off, smuggle them out, smash them, test them."

Verdict

On 13 February 2008, Alparslan Arslan and Osman Yıldırım were sentenced to life imprisonment without parole. The detailed ruling by Ankara's 11th High Criminal Court stated that no connection to Ergenekon was found.

Telephone traffic of Alparslan Arslan with the Ergenekon suspects before the attack was also included in the indictment. It has been determined that Arslan met Ayhan Parlak, who is known to be in contact with Muzaffer Tekin and Ertuğrul Yılmaz, 108 times, 94 times with İbrahim Cingi, nicknamed 'Butterfly İbrahim', who is alleged to be a member of the criminal organization led by Sedat Peker, and 35 times with Muzaffer Tekin.

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References

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