Investigation into alleged assassination attempt targeting Turkish Deputy PM Arınç dropped

ANKARA

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The investigation into an alleged assassination attempt targeting Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arınç has been closed with a nonsuit decision regarding 38 people, with the prosecutor citing the sensitivity of “state secrets” in the case.

The nonsuit decision in the investigation, during which investigations were conducted in the General Staff’s so-called “cosmic room,” where the military’s secret information is kept, was reached five years after the probe opened, with no evidence found regarding the assassination attempt.

The decision stated that it was not known who had made the copies of a hard disk containing information gathered from the “cosmic room,” which was as big as 1.5 terabytes, as no protocol about the process was found, daily Milliyet reported on March 12.

“It was understood that no protocol was found regarding taking a copy of the [hard disk of information] at the time before it was handed it over to experts who would be conducting the process,” daily Milliyet reported the decision as stating.

The 1.5 terabytes of “state secret” information equal around 125 million Word documents, the daily calculated.

Prosecutor Tekin Küçük reached a nonsuit decision for the 38 suspects in the investigation, stating that “no concrete or convincing evidence that any of the suspects were planning to commit the alleged crime was collected.

The investigation did not begin with a tip-off, even though this was stated in the protocol when the investigation opened on Dec. 19, 2009, as such a phone call to the Police Department’s Anti-Terror Branch was never recorded, the ruling also stated.

Two soldiers who were arrested on the street of Arınç’s home in Ankara in 2009 were accused of attempting to assassinate Arınç.
However, they were not on or near Arınç’s house’s street when the alleged tip-off call had come, and were actually spotted in a different part of the Turkish capital.

“Between 2:50 p.m. and 5 p.m., at the alleged tip-off time, the suspects were not found in the Çukurambar neighborhood and did not follow Arınç as alleged. It is understood that the suspects were in a mall between 2:30 p.m. and 4:32 p.m.,” the statement added.