(The following was sent to me by a reader to whom I am most grateful. VS)
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The assassination of the leftist investigative journalist and columnist Ugur Mumcu in 1993 was seen by Turkey’s secular establishment, media and armed forces as an opportunity to galvanize anti-Islamic feelings in general and anti-Iranian feelings in particular. The assassination was blamed on Iran, who allegedly used the (Turkish) Hizbullah as a pawn. In reality, the Sunni Hizbullah has very little in common with its namesake in Lebanon and it is an established fact that this group was used by Turkey’s paramilitary establishment against the PKK during the 1990’s.

Recently, news items on Hizbullah have once again started appearing in the Turkish media. There are grounds to interpret this as part of a subtle psychological operation to season the Turkish public opinion against Iran. If that proves to be the case, then the parallels between the Mumcu assassination and the 1994 bombing of a Jewish Centre in Buenos Aires are quite striking.

Ugur Mumcu was assassinated by the US, claims his brother

Tevhid Haber, 26 January 2008

Renown journalist Ugur Mumcu was assassinated in Ankara on 24 January 1993. On the 15th anniversary of his assassination (24 January 2008), Ugur Mumcu’s solicitor brother Ceyhan Mumcu said to Ulusal Kanal (National Channel) that he was definitely murdered by the US and that blaming Iran for this was a mere diversion. Ceyhan Mumcu has made the following call to the public: “Let’s be careful from now on and do not claim that Ugur Mumcu was murdered by Iran. Although I’ve been reiterating this point frequently, unfortunately some people are still giving statements to the contrary to the press. According to my research, US took the decision to murder him in May 1992.”

Ceyhan also said that over the last years of his life Ugur Mumcu was conducting a research on the activities of the US- and Israel-linked terror organization PKK.

Throughout his life he never wrote critical pieces on Iran; on the contrary, he once wrote about his esteem for Khomeini who said ‘neither USA or USSR’ and aimed for a completely independent Iran. “My brother was murdered due to his anti-imperialist and pro-independence stance” said Ceyhan.

(link to the original news item in Turkish: http://www.tevhidhaber.com/news_detail.php?id=30261)