Attackers stone Turkish church
Pastor Dale Morgan
Attackers stone Turkish church*
From correspondents in Istanbul, Turkey
January 29, 2007 03:31am
Article from: Reuters
UNIDENTIFIED attackers threw stones at a church in the northern Turkish
town of Samsun in the latest attack on Christians in predominantly
Muslim Turkey.
Windows were broken but Mehmet Orhan Picakcilar, a pastor at the Agape
Church, was quoted as saying there were no casualties.
"This does damage to Turkey. This attack depicts Turkey in a bad way
before international public opinion," Mr Picakcilar said.
The attack happened hours after a nationalist protester with a handgun
made a brief attempt to hijack a commuter ferry in the Dardanelles
strait on Saturday.
Passengers said he had been angered by pro-Armenian sentiment in Turkey
after the January 19 killing of the Turkish-Armenian editor Hrant Dink,
which prompted large pro-Armenian protests.
Growing nationalism among young people from Turkey's Black Sea towns has
come under the spotlight since the teenager suspected of killing Dink
and his alleged supporters were found to have come from the town of Trabzon.
A Catholic priest was killed in his church in Trabzon last February by a
Turkish teenager. The killing was believed to have been part of protests
in Islamic countries against cartoons in Danish newspapers that mocked
Prophet Mohammad.
Christians in secular Turkey - Armenians, Greeks, Syriacs, Catholics,
some Evangelical denominations and Jehovah's Witnesses - make up less
than one per cent of the country's 72 million people.