ANKARA (Anatolia News Agency)–A spokesperson with the United States Embassy in Ankara has said the U.S. had no involvement with a probe in Turkey over an alleged criminal network known as Ergenekon.
The spokesperson described the allegation as “ridiculous” in a written statement on Monday, saying that the embassy could not comment on an ongoing case in a Turkish court.
A national newspaper in Turkey reported that part of an indictment in the Ergenekon probe alleged a car registered with the U.S. Consulate in Istanbul had entered a military zone to take photographs in Istanbul’s Poyrazkoy district, the scene of an excavation that unearthed weapons and explosives last April.
The spokesperson said they had no record of a consulate vehicle being present at the site on April 7, 2009.
The Ergenekon gang was brought into the limelight after police seized 27 grenades, explosives and fuses in a shantyhouse in Istanbul on June 12, 2007. The Istanbul Chief Prosecutor’s Office launched an investigation into the weapons.
Police conducted operations in several provinces and detained a number of people, including retired senior army officers as well as officers on active duty, journalists and businessmen for their alleged involvement in the network.
The gang is accused of conspiring to overthrow the Turkish government by increasing instability in the country through political assassinations.
The United States indirectly or ostensibly took part in some of the assissinations by giving Ergenekon information on Armenians in Turkey and in the Diaspora through the FBI. Of course, when Ergenekon has enlisted El Queda and the Taliban, and also mastermined the assissination of Hrant Dink, now the United States wants to back away from these probes.
There is going to be hell to pay in the United States, in the political sense, if the FBI was spying on US citizens and giving that information to Ergenekon. There is going to be revenge, Armenian style.
The US has a stake in Ergenekon since the beginning, as Ergenekon was some kind of Turkish Gladio, set up during the cold war. The embassy may do all the denying in the world, but they are concerned that none of what emerges from the probe can lead back to them. Thus their “extreme interest” in the probe.