Vedat Serin, a member of a Protestant church in the Malatya province in eastern Turkey, was allegedly threatened by a young ultra-nationalist male who said soldiers had asked him to murder Christians, according to a criminal complaint filed by a church association and obtained by Ahval.
While Serin was walking down the street 3-4 months ago in Malatya province, the man, named Tolgahan A., stopped him and asked: “How are you, brother Vedat?”.
“Do I know you?” Serin replied. “I came to the church and talked to you some time ago, Tolgahan A. said in response.
The conversation was over and the men parted ways.
On Aug. 25, while Serin was at the church, Tolgahan A. entered at around 6:40 p.m.
“Yesterday I went to Sultansuyu district. I found a Bible under a tree. I came to the church thinking it was a sign,” he told Serin.
According to the criminal complaint submitted to the Malatya Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office, Tolgahan A. told Serin that he was the head of the far-right grey wolves group in the city, which is connected to the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP).
Tolgahan A. said that JITEM (Gendarmerie Intelligence and Anti-terror Unit) members and soldiers came to visit him giving him the addresses and photos of Serin and Salvation Churches Association Chair İhsan Özbek and Timothy Wesley Stone, who used to live in Malatya.
“If you kill them, we will give you whatever you want,” the JITEM members and soldiers told him.
Tolgahan A. said that the people gave him a gun and sent him to the church with a friend, but when they saw a little boy playing with a computer inside, they came back.
Tolgahan A. claimed that a second attempt was cancelled after the murder of Russian Ambassador Andrey Karlov in capital Ankara in December, 2016.
Malatya is notorious for a hideous murder of Christians who belonged to the Salvation Church of which Serin is a member. Two Turkish converts from Islam and a German citizen were attacked, tortured and murdered in a publishing house by five ultranationalists assailants on April 18, 2007. The murders became known as the missionary massacres in the Turkish media.
After the killings, the publishing house was shut down and some Christians left the city or Turkey.
According to the criminal complaint, Tolgahan A. noted that he and his father went to a gym owned by the father of Emre Günaydın who was the chief suspect of the Zirve Publishing House murder. Tolgahan A. and his father spoke to Günaydın’s father Mustafa Günaydın about the visit of JITEM members and soldiers., “Don’t do it, they used my son,” Günaydın told them. “I still feel sorry for my son who is in jail,” he cried.
Social media posts of Tolgahan A. show that he praised Günaydın’s murder of the three Christians at the publishing house. He was also pictured holding guns in other social media posts.
“The statements of Tolgahan A. cannot be made-up since they contain too many details,” Vedat Serin, İhsan Özbek and Orhan Kemal Cengiz, who is the lawyer of the Salvation Church Association, claim in their criminal complaint about Tolgahan A.
Today, there are believed to be around 100,000 Christians left in the country of 82 million, among them Greek Orthodox, Armenian and Syriac Christians, as well as Catholic and Protestant communities.
Ahval