"The assailants broke at least 10 windows in an overnight attack," Mehmet Orhan Picaklar, the pastor of the Agape Church, told The Associated Press by telephone. "This is the seventh or eight such attack over the past three years. Separately, I am constantly receiving death threats by e-mail."
Picaklar said the church had moved into the building just two weeks ago. Uniformed police officers were deployed outside the church after the attack, the private Dogan news agency reported.
The attack was the latest against Christians in this predominantly Muslim country.
Ethnic Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, who spoke out about the mass killings of Armenians in the early 20th century, was gunned down outside his newspaper on Jan. 19.
Last February, a Turkish teenager shot dead a Catholic priest, the Rev. Andrea Santoro, as he knelt in prayer in his church in the Black Sea port of Trabzon. The attack was believed linked to widespread anger in the Islamic world over the publication in European newspapers of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad. Two other Catholic priests were also attacked last year.
Of Turkey's 70 million people, some 65,000 are Armenian Orthodox Christians, 6,000 are Roman Catholic, and 3,500 are Protestant, the latter are mostly converts from Islam. Around 2,000 are Greek Orthodox and 23,000 are Jewish.
Posted January 29th, 2007 by admin_huliq
