More Ergenekon Indictment Leaks
Two suspects in the Ergenekon case have fled abroad, former Justice and Development Party (AKP) deputy Turan Cömez and retired Major General Levent Ersöz.
Last week, one of the three prosecutors in charge of the investigation, Zekeriya Öz, was threatened first in a letter and then in telegraphs by a prison warden who described himself as a friend of retired major general and Ergenekon suspect Veli Kücük, who is under arrest.
Gang Structure:
The Ergenekon gang had a feudal structure linked to a clan called ‘Agarta’, a mythical Central Asian secret organization that hid in caves, with the Turkish version of the name being ‘Ergenekon’.
The Ergenekon group is formed of 20 departments headed by a president and a deputy. Every department worked as a separate cell.
A few years ago, Istanbul Chief Prosecutor Aykut Cengiz Engin asked the Organized Crime Bureau chief in the Istanbul Police Department, Adil Serdar Sacan, to investigate the claims made against the Ergenekon gang. Sacan ended the investigation a year later without finding anything. According to news reports on the Ergenekon indictment, police found notes describing bribes given to Sacan and secret notes sent by Sacan to Engin in Veli Kücük’s apartment.
The Ergenekon gang had links to organized crime, an allegation supported by the testimony of jailed mafia leaders Alaattin Cakici and Sedat Peker.
Links to past crimes (among others noted in the indictment):
–Inciting the attack on the Council of State in 2006 that left one top judge dead and the grenade attacks on daily Cumhuriyet’s Istanbul offices the same year.
– Assassination of nationalist academic Necip Hablemitoglu and the violence in Istanbul’s Gazi neighborhood in 1995 that left 17 people dead.
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