25 held by Turkish police ahead of Nato summit
Turkish police have arrested 25 members of an al-Qaida linked group suspected of planning to bomb a Nato summit due to be attended by Tony Blair and George Bush next month.
Sixteen were held in an operation on April 29 in the north-western province of Bursa, said local governor Oguz Kagan Koksal.
The suspects were members of Ansar al-Islam, a group linked to the al-Qaida terrorist network, and were also planning to attack a synagogue in Bursa and rob a bank to provide funds for the group, Koksal said.
Nine other suspected members of the group with explosives training were detained in a simultaneous raid in Istanbul, the semi-official Anatolia news agency reported. The nine appeared in an Istanbul court today, the agency said.
Turkey has heightened security ahead of the Istanbul summit, launching security sweeps throughout the country.
The Nato summit on June 28 and 29 will be the first since Romania, Bulgaria, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Slovenia and Slovakia joined the alliance in April to take its membership to 26.
More than 60 people were killed in bomb attacks at two Istanbul synagogues, a London-based bank and the British Consulate last November.
Turkish officials have charged 69 suspected members of a Turkish al-Qaida cell in connection with the bombings. Their trial is scheduled to begin later this month.
Koksal said the group’s leader, identified only as Alpaslan T, was among the suspects detained in Bursa. The raid came after a year-long surveillance of the group by police, the governor said.
“The group, which was in the middle of an attack plan, has been rendered ineffective,” Koksal said.
The governor said police also seized equipment to make remote-controlled bombs, guns, books on bomb-making, and forged identity documents.
Some of the suspects surveyed the site of a synagogue in Bursa as well as that of a bank, Koksal said, adding that the suspects planned to flee to Iraq to fight US troops there after carrying out a “sensational” attack in Turkey.
The 16 suspects were expected to appear before a court in Bursa today.
An Islamic group based in northern Iraq also goes by the name Ansar al-Islam and is suspected of carrying out bombings in Irbil in February that left 109 dead.
A police official said the Turkish group and the northern Iraq group operated independently, but shared “the same ideology and tactics.”
The Turkish group increased in size following the US war in Iraq, the official said.
Earlier this month, authorities rounded up dozens of alleged members of the Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party-Front, or DHKP-C, in simultaneous raids in Turkey, Italy, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands.
The crackdown was seen as the fruit of increased international security cooperation before the Nato summit and the Athens Summer Olympics.
According to Turkish media, more than 30,000 police and other security forces, including hundreds of snipers, are expected to be on duty at the summit.
Police are also reportedly keeping a close eye on anti-war, anti-globalisation, and various left-wing groups ahead of the summit, fearing they could stage protests or attacks.
