Paris Assassin Dies

[Armenian Bishop]

Turkish Assassin Ömer Güney, a Turkish National Intelligence Organization (MIT) member, and "Suspect in Paris Murder of Three Female Kurdish Activists Dies Under Suspicious Circumstances."

http://armenianweekly.com/2016/12/19/omer-guney/

PARIS, France (A.W.)—Thirty-four-year-old Ömer Güney, the jailed suspect of the 2013 assassination of three female Kurdish activists in in Paris, died in hospital on Dec. 17, just days before his trial. Guney, the only suspect charged with the murders, reportedly died following a battle with a serious brain injury, a judicial source told international news outlet Agence France-Presse (AFP).

Güney was charged with the Jan. 10, 2013 murders of the co-founder of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) Sakine Cansiz, Kurdistan National Committee (KNC) representative and head of the Kurdish Fidan Doğan, and activist Leyla Soylemez, who were shot dead at point blank at the Kurdish institute.

At the time of the murders, then French interior minister Manuel Valls said the three were “summarily executed.”

Güney was charged with “assassinations in connection with a terrorist enterprise” shortly after the assassinations. His trial was scheduled to start on Jan. 23, 2017, according to AFP.

Lawyers for the victims’ families issued a statement expressing the “anger of the families of the victims, deprived of a public trial for which they had waited for nearly four years.”

“France is still not able to judge a political crime committed on French territory by foreign secret services,” read another part of the statement signed by lawyers Sylvie Boitel, Antoine Comte, Virginia Dusen, Jan Fermon, and Jean-Louis Malterre.

French investigators had concluded that members of the Turkish secret service (National Intelligence Organization/MIT) were involved in the triple assassination, a judicial source told AFP.

Cansiz was a founding member of the PKK, and the first senior female member of the organization. She led the Kurdish protest movement out of Diyarbakir prison in Turkey in 1980’s. Later, she worked with PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan in Syria, and was a commander of the women’s guerrilla movement in Kurdish areas of northern Iraq. Until her assassination, Cansiz headed the PKK women’s movement in Europe.

[Böri]

The New York Times

KURDS MASSACRE MORE ARMENIANS

APRIL 26, 1915

TIFLIS, Transcaucasia, April 24 (via Petrograd and London, April 23.)-- Refugees who have reached the Russian line report that massacre of Armenians by Mohammedans are being continued on even a greater scale. They say that all the inhabitants of ten villages near Van, in Armenia, Asiatic Turkey, have been put to death.

On being advised of massacres at Erzrum, Berjan and Zeitun, and of the conditions at Van, the Katolicos, head of Armenian church at Etchmiadzin near Erivan, cabled to President Wilson an appeal to the people of United States on behalf of the Armenians.

Robert M. Labaree, an American missionary of Urumiah, Persia, who visited the Serbian villages and with whom the refugees were quartered, says he found the humanity of the people as broad as their means were limited. The village Governments or Relief Committees had issued eight pounds of flour to each refugee in six weeks.

The Associated Press received reports of the massacre of 800 of the villagers in Urza and of 720 in Salmas. The painful uncertainty concerning the 15,000 survivors of Urza was confirmed by a journey through Salmas. Three weeks had failed to obliterate the signs of the slaughter. Pools of blood still marked the execution places in Haftevan. The caps of thirty-six victims lay where a mud wall had been topped over on them. A young man named Hackatur related the story of his escape from a well in which the bodies of the dead had been crammed. He fell with others and was tossed into the well, but he managed to wriggle through the bodies lying on top of him and escaped at nightfall.

Not all the Christians lacked the courage or means for self-defense. At the desolated Catholic mission at Hosrova, where forty-eight victims of the massacre were buried, Elizabeth Marcara, an Armenian girl, told how she and young David Ishmu battled with the Kurds. Her story later was amply confirmed.

"When the Kurds burst the village gates," said Miss Marcara, "we took rifles and mounted to the roof. I fired eighty shots. The Kurds were forced to withdraw outside the village wall. There I killed two and David two. Later we killed four more, one of whom was the Chief. The Kurds abandoned their plunder, and carried off their dead.

"The battle lasted three hours. The death of their Chief caused the Kurds to flee. We came from the roof and recovered the things the Kurds had left behind them. Reinforced, I fled with my relatives, We saw the Kurds engaged in the pillage of Hafgvan and fired on them, but they escaped with their valuables.

http://www.armeniapedia.org/index.ph...s_-nyt19150426