TURKEY: Turkish police have detained nine men, including three military officers, suspected of being involved in a plot against premier Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkish newspapers reported yesterday.
A police spokesman said anti-terrorist squads made the arrests in Ankara late on Wednesday evening, following a tip-off that the men were "planning an attack against a politician".
As well as explosives, grenades and guns, investigators reportedly found sketch maps showing the streets surrounding Mr Erdogan's Ankara house and the locations of supermarkets owned by one of his more prominent advisers, businessman Cuneyd Zapsu.
The arrests come just two weeks after a gunman, apparently linked to an ultra-nationalist group, shot and killed a senior judge, leading to widespread media speculation the two groups were linked.
Though there is no evidence so far to support such claims, the men arrested on Wednesday also appear to be nationalists.
Police say they belonged to a secretive group whose members swore on their "honour to defend our sacred flag to the last drop of our blood".
Potentially more significant were the Turkish media's claimsthe three officers belong to one of the military's most secretive counter-terrorism agencies.
Set up in the 1950s to combat communism, the then United States-funded Special Warfare Department (OHD) is believed to have played an important part in the dirty war of assassinations and disappearances that Turkey waged against Kurdish separatists in the 1980s and 1990s.
If confirmed, the OHD connection will almost certainly fuel suspicions that elements within the state are set on destabilising the country as it moves towards European Union accession.
Such suspicions were triggered last November when two military intelligence officers were arrested for their alleged part in a fatal bomb attack that prompted bloody riots throughout Turkey's mainly Kurdish southeast.
Postponed for a month, their trial began again this week with the military police high command intervening to prevent classified information being discussed in court.
Though reforms over the past three years have whittled away at the powerful Turkish military's role in politics, calls for further reductions are expected to be high on the agenda when the European Commission gives Ankara a critical interim report card on June 12th.
Turkey has set its annual economic growth target for 2007-2013 at an average 6.5 per cent, Mr Erdogan said yesterday.
Unveiling Turkey's official economic development plan, he told the High Board of Planning (YPK) that the annual inflation target for 2013 would be 3 per cent. - (Additional reporting Reuters)