Suspects accused of helping to orchestrate the brutal murders of three Christians, in southeast Turkey in 2007, blamed the crime on the Hizmet movement, an influential Islamic group accused of treason by the ruling Turkish government, at the 97th round of hearings on 15 October.
Testimony from two former military officers and an Islamic university researcher dominated the hearings in a trial that has gone on for seven years The accused perpetrators were brought from prison to read out their lengthy defence claims to the Malatya First High Criminal Court.
The three men claimed that the Hizmet movement led by Muslim scholar Fetullah Gülen was behind the torture and stabbing to death of two Turkish converts to Christianity and a German missionary at the Zirve Publishing House in Malatya in April 2007.
The defendants declared that the socio-religious group, which had once been a strong ally of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), had planned the deadly plot to discredit the Turkish military and overthrow the government.
After leading AKP officials were implicated in a massive corruption investigation last December, then-Prime Minister, now President Recep Tayyip Erdogan labelled Hizmet an illegal, secretive ‘parallel structure’ within the state, and vowed to root out its adherents from the police force and judiciary.
Lawyers representing the Malatya victims’ families dismissed the defendants’ ‘parallel structure’ accusations as political manipulation in an attempt to deflect concrete evidence pointing at military and ultra-nationalist involvement in the deadly plot. In effect, lawyers said, the suspects were exploiting the government’s ‘witch-hunt’ against the Hizmet movement in order to get themselves acquitted.
