Tekin said he was implicated in the investigation only because two hollow hand grenades in his office were being used as pencil holders. "It is impossible to understand why these ornamental grenades in the indictment were treated as weapons of the 'organization' despite my having repeated many times in the police interrogation that the fuse elements of these two hand grenades had been taken out and they were souvenirs for when I retired," Tekin said, accusing the prosecutors of being selective with parts of a file on a 2007 attack on the Council of State, which, the prosecution asserts, was organized by Ergenekon. Tekin said the police had no evidence that the bombs were owned by any organization.

Tekin said he first heard the name "Ergenekon terrorist organization" after the Council of State attack, in which a senior judge was fatally shot. "I am most distressed about being associated with an organization that I do not know a single thing about."

He also claimed that that indictment was an exact match to the script of the popular TV series "Kurtlar Vadısı," (Valley of the Wolves), which features the story of shady characters working as undercover agents and their relationships with the criminal mafia.

He stated that he had never taken part in an illegal network such as Ergenekon in his life. He accused the prosecution of turning the nickname used by his family into a "codename" he supposedly uses inside the organization. He also accused the prosecution of sending confidential documents about the investigation to pro-government newspapers.

Tekin said the case was riddled with major violations of the law and claimed most of the evidence was manufactured while the suspects had been in prison. He accused the prosecution of being on a witch hunt against critics of the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) government.

He also claimed that statements from suspect Osman Yıldırım are not true. Yıldırım testified that he planned the Council of State murder together with Alparslan Arslan, who was the hit man in the attack. He disparaged the indictment's claim that Yıldırım had rejected $1 million to shoot academic Necip Hablemitoğlu. "Yıldırım turned down $1 million in 2002 but accepted $500,000 to bomb the office of the Cumhuriyet newspaper. This is not consistent with the rules of everyday life," he said. The attackers of the Council of State also carried out a hand grenade attack at Cumhuriyet's office the same year, with no one being injured.

The İstanbul 13th High Criminal Court is hearing the case in a makeshift courtroom inside Silivri Prison near İstanbul. Among the 86 suspects are retired Gen. Veli Küçük and lawyer Kemal Kerinçsiz, who is known for filing lawsuits against intellectuals over writings that question or criticize the state line on issues such as Armenian allegations of genocide. Forty-six of the suspects are in custody, and the rest have been released pending the outcome of the trial.

The existence of Ergenekon has long been suspected, but the current investigation into the group began only in 2007.

The Ergenekon indictment, made public in July, claims that the Ergenekon network is behind a series of political assassinations carried out over the past two decades for the ultimate purpose of triggering a military coup and taking over the government. The victims include secularist journalist Uğur Mumcu, long believed to have been assassinated by Islamic extremists in 1993; the head of a business conglomerate, Özdemir Sabancı, who was shot dead by militants of the extreme-left Revolutionary People's Liberation Party/Front (DHKP/C) in his high-security office in 1996; and secularist academic Hablemitoğlu, who was also believed to have been killed by Islamic extremists in 2002.

Suspects face various charges, including "membership in an armed terrorist group," "attempting to destroy the government," "inciting people to rebel against the Republic of Turkey" and other similar crimes.


TODAYSZAMAN