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Turkish Police Detain Retired Generals in Anti-Government Probe |
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Written by Bloomberg
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Tuesday, 01 July 2008 06:01 |
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Turkish police detained former military generals and the head of Ankara's main business association as they sought to apprehend a group suspected of plotting to bring down the government.
Retired generals Hursit Tolon and Sener Eruygur were detained this morning, a spokesman for the Ankara police said in a telephone interview. Ankara Chamber of Commerce chief Sinan Aygun was also taken into custody.
The arrests come on the day a Turkish prosecutor presented an indictment to the Constitutional Court to close down Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's governing Justice and Development Party on charges of mixing Islam with politics. The court may rule on the case within a month.
Dozens of suspected members of the group known as ``Ergenekon,'' including former military officers, were rounded up by police in January. Erdogan in March denied any links between the arrests and the closure case against his party.
Retired General Eruygur, who was detained today, is the head of the Ataturk Thought Association, a pro-secular lobby group. The association organized street rallies attended by hundreds of thousands of people last year to protest parliament's appointment of former Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul as president on grounds of his Islamist past.
Turkish police also arrested Mustafa Balbay, the Ankara bureau chief of the Cumhuriyet newspaper, said Mutluhan Karagozoglu, a lawyer for the newspaper, in a televised news conference in Ankara. Cumhuriyet's writers have accused the government of flouting Turkey's secular rules. Police made 17 arrests in Istanbul today linked to the case, CNN Turk television reported.
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