Terrorists held in Turkey 'were trained in Pakistan'
ANKARA, May 4: A group of alleged terrorists arrested in Turkey on suspicion of planning an attack on a NATO meeting were trained in Pakistan and were planning to carry out a suicide mission against US President George W. Bush, Turkish press reports said on Tuesday.
The suspects, who had been tracked by Turkish authorities for months before their arrest, were allegedly in possession of Turkish-subtitled video cassettes attributed to Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden calling for a jihad against America, according to the reports.
They were allegedly planning to bomb the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) summit scheduled for June 28 and 29 in Istanbul - the scene of four bloody suicide bombings five months ago - where Bush and other world leaders will attend, according to police sources quoted by the papers.
The suspects were arrested in raids carried out jointly by Turkish secret police and anti-terrorist units in the northwestern city of Bursa, though no dates were disclosed.
Nine of them were charged on Monday by a Bursa court with "membership in an outlawed terrorist organization" and 16 others, arrested in the Bursa raids and separate operations in Istanbul, were released.
The Hurriyet newspaper claimed the suspects confessed to prosecutors they were planning a suicide attack to kill Bush. The June summit in Turkey, will be the first time the heads of state and government of the 26 NATO members gather in Istanbul, and the war in neighbouring Iraq was expected to feature high on the agenda.
The nine were charged with membership in an Iraq-based extremist group called Ansar al-Islam, an organization Washington says is linked to Al Qaeda. The Hurriyet and Vatan papers said several of them underwent physical and psychological training in Pakistan to prepare them to carry out a suicide mission.
At least one of the suspects had been trained in flying gliders, the two papers said. The reports said searches of the Turkish suspects' homes and work places turned up huge quantities of weapons and bomb-making equipment including timers, detonators, chemicals and instruction manuals.
A NATO spokesman in Brussels on Monday said a change of venue for the June summit was "not under consideration". "The Turkish authorities are responsible for security and we have confidence in them," the spokesman said.
Our reporter from Islamabad adds: When the sources in the in interior ministry contacted, they said that they had no knowledge of any such thing and they have not received any such information from the Turkish government.
"We have no information in this regard. You check with the foreign office as they might be in the knowledge if there is any such thing," the interior ministry spokesman told Dawn.
When contacted, the foreign office spokesman Masood M. Khan also said that he was not aware of any such reports. "I need to have the details if there any such thing. So far I am not aware of this. I will be able to comment on this tomorrow," Mr Khan told Dawn.
