Aslan: Radical fury

Ankara, May 17 (Reuters): A Turkish gunman, proclaiming his Islamic faith, killed one judge and injured four other judges today in a shooting in a top court which Turkey’s President condemned as an attack on its secular establishment.

The top administrative court’s deputy chairwoman said the assailant described himself as a “soldier of Allah” as he carried out the attack. President Ahmet Necdet Sezer said it would go down as a “black mark in the republic’s history”.

The court, the Council of State, has faced fierce criticism in Islamist circles for hardline implementation of secular laws such as a headscarf ban in universities and state offices.

The attack is a stark reminder of the great divide between Turkey’s secularists and those they perceive as Islamists bent on reviving the influence of religion in national life. The attacker, Alparslan Aslan, a young lawyer, burst into the court’s second chamber and started shooting with a handgun during a committee meeting at around 0700 GMT. He was arrested soon after.

The CNN Turk website reported the assailant as saying in interrogation he had targeted the judges because of a ruling in February preventing a woman from becoming a head teacher because she wore a headscarf. It did not give a source for the report.

“It is seen that this is an attack against our republic and our republic’s irrevocable democratic and secular character,” Sezer, a staunch secularist, said in a rare comment to reporters after visiting the court.

Islamic militants, Kurdish separatists and far-Leftists have all carried out attacks in Turkey, which began EU accession talks last October, in recent years.

Suicide bombings blamed on al Qaida killed more than 60 people in Istanbul in 2003.

“The target of the attack is the constitution as well as the Council of State ... Turkey is being dragged towards a very dangerous place,” Opposition leader Deniz Baykal said.

Television pictures showed injured people being carried away to ambulances from the court in the heart of Ankara. Police imposed tight security around the building.

“The attacker entered the chamber during a meeting and opened fire on each of the members, saying: ‘We are soldiers of Allah,” the court’s deputy chairwoman Tansel Colasan said.

Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, whose government is campaigning for rules on headscarves to be changed, quickly condemned the shooting, calling it an attack against all the Republic's institutions.

Last week unknown assailants lobbed a bomb at the office of Turkey’s most staunchly secular newspaper, the third attack in a few days.