-
ANKARA - Turkish President Ahmet Necdet Sezer said Wednesday that a deadly attack on judges at Turkey's top adminsitrative court aimed at undermining this Muslim-majority country's secular regime.
"When you look at the attack, you see that it is not caused by personal animosity but ... targets the Republic and particularly its unchangeable principles of democracy and secularism," said Sezer, a staunch secularist and a former senior judge.
"It is impossible to reverse the advances of the Republic," he told reporters in a rare public remark. "All our institutions will forever defend the principles of the Republic. No one should doubt that."
Sezer was speaking outside the Council of State, where the attack occurred earlier Wednesday, after he paid a visit to the court's chairwoman to personally convey his condolences.
A senior judge was killed and four others wounded when a man shouting "I am a soldier of Allah" stormed into the court and sprayed bullets on judges who were in the middle of a legal session, officials said.
Court members described the attack as retaliation for rulings confirming a ban on Islamic headscarves in public insititutions and universities in Turkey.
The attack raised tensions as the Islamist-rooted government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, which is critical of the headscarf ban and court rulings upholding it, faced accusations of failing to defend the republic's secular principles.
05/17/2006 15:35 GMT
