A Turkish lawyer shouting: ”I am a soldier of Allah,” opened fire in the country’s top administrative court on Wednesday, killing one judge and injuring four others.
Witnesses described how the gunman shouted, ”Allahu Akbar” (God is most great) as he fired a handgun in the court’s second chamber.
The assailant, a lawyer accredited with the Istanbul bar association, later told police he carried out the attack because the court had stopped a woman becoming a headteacher on the grounds that she wore a headscarf. One of the judges, Mustafa Yucel Ozbilgin, was shot in the head and died later in hospital, Anatolia news agency reported.
Four of the judges, including Ozbilgin, had voted in February against the promotion of an elementary school teacher who wore a headscarf outside of work. The fifth had voted in favour. The judges’ photographs were published by the pro-Islamist Vakit newspaper.
The court’s decision was criticised by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Prime Minister, whose AK party has roots in political Islam. Erdogan condemned the shooting.
The attack was the most dramatic sign yet that religious-minded Turks are becoming frustrated in the predominantly Muslim, but strictly secular, country.
Ahmet Necdet Sezer, the President, who has voiced fears over the country’s creeping Islamisation, described it as a ”black mark in the republic’s history”, adding that ”pressure and threats will not intimidate the Turkish judiciary, which will continue its constitutional duties bound to the secular and democratic republic.” The opposition leader, Deniz Baykal, said the shooting showed Turkey was ”being dragged towards a very dangerous place”.
Erdogan, whose wife, Emine, is banned from attending official presidential functions because she wears a headscarf, has called for the ban to be lifted.
Last week unknown assailants shouting ”Allahu Akbar” lobbed a percussion bomb at the office of Turkey’s most staunchly secularist newspaper, the third attack in a few days.
The ban on headscarves, imposed when Mustafa Kemal Ataturk carved the modern republic out of the Ottoman empire in 1923, is regarded as one of the most divisive issues in Turkey today. With presidential and parliamentary elections next year, it has become a source of friction between the Islamist government and the secular establishment.
The Cumhuriyet daily, the mouthpiece of Turkey’s secularist establishment, recently ran a campaign warning of what it sees as rising Islamism. General Hilmi Ozkok, the head of the military, which casts itself as the defender of Turkey’s secularism, denounced the shooting as ”this vile attack with hate”. – Guardian Unlimited Â