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ANKARA: Records show Santoro killed while under police surveillance

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  • ANKARA: Records show Santoro killed while under police surveillance

    Today's Zaman, Turkey
    Feb. 22, 2008


    Records show Santoro killed while under police surveillance


    Records that recently came to light as part of another murder case
    have shown that an Italian priest shot dead by a teenager two years
    ago in Turkey was in fact under police surveillance when the murder
    occurred.


    Father Andrea Santoro was killed on Feb. 5, 2006, in his church in
    the northern Black Sea port city of Trabzon.
    The piece of information that the priest was actually being monitored
    by the police was recently revealed by records that went into the
    file of Yasin Hayal, whose trial is pending as the prime inciter of
    the murder of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink in 2007. Dink
    was shot dead outside his office in January of 2007 by an
    ultra-nationalist teenager, who is also from Trabzon.

    According to police records in Hayal's file, the Trabzon police
    applied to a court in Erzurum for a warrant to monitor Santoro's
    phone conversations, on Nov. 8, 2006, three months before the murder
    of Santoro.

    The Trabzon police cited suspicions that Santoro might be carrying
    out "separatist activities to revive the state of Pontus" --
    established in the region along the eastern coast of the Black Sea
    and an autonomous state until the 13th century -- as the reason for
    its request for a wiretapping order. However, the phone conversations
    of Santoro were not the only ones the Trabzon police were interested
    in. On the same day, the police requested permission from the court
    to monitor the phone conversations of none other than Hayal and
    another man named Hasan Deveci. The two were suspected of having
    Salafi-Wahhabi leanings, according to the police request. The request
    letter also said the police had reason to believe Hayal and Deveci
    had contacts with other groups that have "radical ideas." Although
    the two requests were made separately, on the day the court received
    the requests a single warrant was issued authorizing the police to
    monitor the calls of both Hayal and Santoro.

    Starting Nov. 8, 2005, the police monitored each phone conversation
    that Hayal and Santoro had every day for three months. The warrant
    was due to expire on Feb. 8, 2006, three days after Santoro was
    killed.

    The investigation so far has not revealed whether there was a
    particular reason for the police to request a phone monitoring
    warrant from the court on the same day, such as a link between the
    radical extremist circles that Hayal was involved in and the priest.

    The 16-year-old who killed Santoro was initially sentenced to life,
    which was then commuted to 20 years in prison due to the
    perpetrator's legal status as a minor.

    It has not yet been established whether Hayal has any links with
    Santoro's killer.


    However, Trabzon Police Chief Feridun Boz said they had uncovered no
    connections between Hayal and the Santoro murder, in a statement he
    made to the Doðan News Agency. Boz denied having any information on
    how Hayal's phone had come to be tapped.



    22.02.2008

    Today's Zaman with wires Ýstanbul
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