Journalist arrested on Ergenekon case kept tabs on Diyarbakir Armenians

PanARMENIAN.Net - Documents seized by police from the office of journalist Soner Yalcin, owner of the odatv.com news portal, arrested on Ergenekon case, show that the journalist kept tabs on Armenian citizens residing in the southeastern province of Diyarbakir and tribes throughout Turkey.

The document included copies of the identity registers of Armenian citizens in Diyarbakir.

In mid-February, Istanbul police searched the offices of Odatv and the homes of the portal’s administrators, detaining four people. Three of the detainees, including Yalcın, were later arrested on charges of membership in a terrorist organization and seizing and publishing confidential state documents. When chief Ergenekon prosecutor Zekeriya Oz asked Yalcin in an interrogation on Feb. 17 where and why he collected the information about the Armenian citizens, Yalcin confessed to having collected information on many Armenians himself.

He said he collected the information on orders from the family of Behcet Canturk, a Kurdish-Armenian drug trafficker, while Yalcin was writing a book about Canturk’s experiences in 1996.

Another document seized at the Odatv headquarters shows that the journalist also kept tabs on dozens of tribes across Turkey, titling the dossier in handwriting that read: “The illegal publication of the top secret state: tribes.”

Yalcin told the prosecutor that he collected information about the tribes for a cover story in Dogru Magazine in 2000 and it was also used later in a book, Today’s Zaman reported.