Alleged coup plotters go on trial in Turkey

Oct 20, 2008, 17:02 GMT

Ankara - The trial of 86 people accused of plotting to create havoc in order to prepare the ground for a military coup got under way in Istanbul on Monday with judges refusing a request that the trial be aborted.

There were chaotic scenes inside the court room located inside the Silviri prison complex with lawyers for the defendants complaining the court room was too small.

The head judge later ruled that the trial would be split in two, with those already being held in prison to be tried first and that each defendant be represented by at most three lawyers.

Speaking to reporters outside the court room former Istanbul rector Kemal Alamdaraoglu, on trial but not imprisoned said the trial itself was 'a joke.'

'This is a first in the history of the world for such a joke to happen,' Alamdaroglu said. 'What I did as a rector was in total alignment with the constitution and the law.'

Lawyers for Dogu Perincek, leader of the Workers' Party (IP), called for the trial to be transferred to the Constitutional Court as the charges linked the IP to the alleged crimes. The call was rejected by the court.

The long-awaited trial of the so-called Ergenekon gang began some 17 months after police discovered hand grenades in an Istanbul house belonging to a former non-commissioned officer.

An investigation found that the grenades were from the same batch that was used in an attack on the Istanbul offices of Cumhuriyet newspaper in 2006.

Investigations into the attack on Cumhuriyet then expanded with prosecutors alleging that staunch secularists had planned to attempt to destabilize Turkey and create the conditions for the military to carry out a coup to depose the moderate Islamist government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

The indictment also says the Ergenekon group were behind a number of murders and had planned on carrying out assassinations of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, former Chief of General Staff Yasar Buyukanit and Nobel Prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk.

Suspects on trial include a retired general, the leader of the Workers' Party, journalists and writers.

Protesters demonstrated outside the court in the Silviri district of Istanbul on Monday, claiming that the arrests and the trial are a government-inspired miscarriage of justice.

Opposition figures have accused the government of organizing the arrests last month to take attention away from its alleged attempts to undermine the secular state and implement Sharia (Islamic) law.

The case was adjourned until Thursday.