ANKARA, 18 May 2006 — A gunman opened fire in Turkey’s top administrative court yesterday, killing one judge and injuring four other judges in a shooting which the country’s leaders condemned as an attack on its secular establishment.
The court’s deputy chairwoman Tansel Colasan said the assailant described himself as a “soldier of Allah” as he carried out the attack. President Ahmet Necdet Sezer said it would go down as a “black mark in the republic’s history.” The court, the Council of State, has faced fierce criticism in Islamist circles for hard-line implementation of secularist laws such as a head scarf ban in universities and state offices.
The attack is a stark reminder of the great divide between Turkey’s secularists and those they perceive as Islamists bent on reviving the influence of religion in national life.
The attacker burst into the court’s second chamber and started shooting with a handgun during a committee meeting at around 10 a.m. (0700 GMT). “He came in shouting: ‘We are the emissaries, the soldiers of Allah’,” said Tansel Colasan, deputy head of the Council of State. “He said he decided to act because of the head scarf ruling, which he said should be punished,” she told reporters.
The wounded were treated at the Hacettepe University Hospital. Hacettepe University President Tuncalp Ozgen told reporters Mustafa Yucel Ozbilgin had died from his injuries. The chamber’s chairman Mustafa Birden was among the injured.
The gunman, identified as 29-year-old Alpaslan Aslan, a lawyer registered with the Istanbul Bar Association, was arrested immediately after the attack. Television footage showed police escorting a lean young man wearing a khaki suit and a tie into a court building.
Justice Minister Cemil Cicek, who visited the court after the shooting, said: “We strongly condemn this attack, which no cause can justify.” Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan also condemned the attack, but angrily rejected any ties between the incident and his Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) campaign to lift the headscarf ban.
Erdogan, who was critical of the court’s head scarf decision in February, was quick to condemn yesterday’s shooting. “I curse and condemn this incident,” Erdogan said. “It is very ugly to draw such links,” Erdogan said.
The CNN Turk website reported the assailant as saying in interrogation he had targeted the judges because of a ruling in February preventing a woman from becoming a head teacher because she wore a head scarf. It did not give a source for the report.
