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Turkey Arrests 37 in al Qaeda Crackdown |
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Written by The Wall Street Journal
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Wednesday, 22 April 2009 07:33 |
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Turkish anti-terror police arrested 37 people Tuesday in the latest crackdown on extremist militants suspected of planning attacks on Turkish soil.
In coordinated raids just after dawn, security forces detained 20 people at suspected al Qaeda cell houses in central and southern Turkey, Turkey's official news agency Anatolia reported.
Fourteen of the suspects were arrested in Gaziantep, a city close to Turkey's Syrian border that police believe to be a logistical hub for militants traveling to and from Iraq.
According to the Turkish media, one of the men arrested had commanded the local al Qaeda cell since January, when the former leader died in a shootout with police that also killed another militant and a policeman.
In a related operation in Kahramanmaras, a region bordering Gaziantep, police arrested 17 alleged members of an unnamed group with suspected links to al Qaeda and continued to look for three others, Anatolia reported.
The Gaziantep police declined to comment on operations, which come two weeks after police in a western Turkish city arrested seven other al Qaeda suspects.
A secular Muslim country and NATO member with 800 soldiers in Afghanistan, Turkey has cracked down hard on al Qaeda-linked groups since November 2003, when 63 people died in four truck bomb attacks in Istanbul that targeted two synagogues, the British consulate and a British bank. Seven men were jailed for life in 2007 for the bombings, including a Syrian national who masterminded the attacks.
Police have accelerated operations since July 2008, when three policemen and three assailants died in a gunbattle outside Istanbul's U.S. consulate. Last December, a Turkish court jailed 22 al Qaeda members believed to have been planning an attack on Western consulates. In January, one suspected militant died and another was injured after undercover police intervened to prevent them from robbing an Istanbul post office.
The second of its kind in a month, the robbery appears to represent a change of strategy on the part of Turkish al Qaeda operatives, who are not known to have attempted such high-profile heists before. |