Thursday April 19, 7:36 PM     Reuters
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Turkish police probe Bible killings amid shock*

By Daren Butler

ISTANBUL (Reuters) - 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 on
Thursday.

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.

Malatya Governor Halil Ibrahim 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. He dined with
the victims just two weeks ago.

MUSLIM BURIAL

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.

The killings came as political tensions rise between Turkey's powerful
secular elite, including army generals and judges, and the
religious-minded AK Party government over next month's presidential
elections.

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.

(Additional reporting by Seyhmus Cakan in Diyarbakir and Paul De Bendern
in Ankara)