General Hursit Tolon was arrested on suspicion that he is a member of a secret group within the military that planned to undermine the government by "creating chaos and unrest".
Right: The three martyrs
This was reported by the Turkish newspaper Zaman on June 24. According to Zaman, Tolon was one of 19 people accused of participating in the murder of three Protestants near a Christian publishing house in Malatya in southeastern Anatolia in April 2007. This happened after plans for the murders were found at a nearby naval base.
Prosecutors are also expected to charge the general with complicity in a 2006 case in which a Roman Catholic priest from Italy, Fr. Andrea Santoro, was shot dead in his church in Trabzon.
Tolon's ultra-nationalist group reportedly wants to block Turkey's access to EU membership by making the country look too unstable and divided to meet EU criteria.
Zaman reports that a retired colonel, a police chief and a teacher of Muslim theology have also been accused of the murders along with Tolon, as well as "forming a terrorist organization" and "working to overthrow the government" in Turkey, whose 71 million people are predominantly Sunni Muslim.
It went on to say that the indictment quoted from military documents describing the attacks in Malatya and Trabzon as "operations" and explaining that their aim was to "create chaos in society", but that it had failed "when large parts of the population protested the killings in mass demonstrations".
Zaman reports that it is feared that anti-Christian attacks will flare up again in Turkey if the 19 accused are released.
In February, the Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch of Istanbul, Bartholomew I, became the first non-Muslim religious leader to be consulted about a planned constitutional reform. In a speech, he emphasized the "sufferings and trials" that small religious groups were going through.
Church representatives have complained about the slow pace of investigations into attacks on Christians, including the 2007 murders. In a similar case, the former Archbishop of the Catholic Church in Turkey, Bishop Luigi Padovese, was murdered in the city of Iskenderun in June 2010.
