Disinformed (Cont'd)

THE BOY KILLER

In the early evening of February 1, 1979, Agca killed Abdi Ipekci on the finest street in Istanbul.

The murder of Ipekci (Ee-pek-chee) is usually called an assassination, which implies that the victim is a prominent person, usually a politically prominent person.

Abdi Ipekci was a prominent man, but hardly a politician. He never had given an indication in his life that he wanted to lower himself to that degree.

Abdi Ipekci

Ipekci was the editor of the most important newspaper in the country—Milliyet. He was also the friend of politicians, because they were useful to his work. On the day of his death he had visited Ankara, the capital, to confer with the prime minister of Turkey, Bulent Ecevit (Ej-e-vit).

Ipekci wanted Ecevit’s backing for an initiative that he was sponsoring to promote peace and friendship with the Greeks, who were bitter longtime enemies of the Turks. Ipekci did his best to secure Ecevit’s agreement for his work, then caught the late afternoon plane back to Istanbul. He drove quickly from the airport to the headquarters of Milliyet, where he had to prepare the paper for the next day’s edition, and write his column, Durum (The Situation).

He managed to do both before driving home to pick up his wife in order to make a late dinner with his publisher. It was a cold night with intermittent rain that made traffic slower than it habitually was. As he came around the corner and down the gentle hill toward his apartment building, a young man blew out of the darkness of the winter’s night and fired his nine millimeter pistol through the window of the driver’s side until the window shattered.

He continued to fire. The police were not sure—they still are not sure—how many shots were fired, but at least five bullets struck Ipekci. Several more lodged in the upholstery of the car. Considering that the shots were fired at point-blank range, the assassin must have been hyped nearly out of his mind. And no doubt Agca was. On this day in the winter of 1979 he was all of twenty-one years old.

The bouts of official incompetence that followed Ipekci’s assassination were made worse by the fact that so many people turned out to mourn one of the heroes of Turkey of that day. The streets of Tesvikiye and Nisantasi, where Ipekci lived, were jammed shoulder to shoulder with mourners as his coffin passed through the gigantic crowd.

Clearly, these people wanted to honor a man who more than anyone had stood for moderation in the midst of sectarian strife. He was not the only one who craved peace, but he was the one they knew best. And he was the most rational.

No one was apprehended for his assassination. The authorities had a sketch of the assassin given by witnesses that in retrospect seems to be accurate, but the man himself simply could not be found.

Agca might never have been found if Milliyet and the newspaper publishers association had not offered a reward of a hundred thousand dollars—a huge sum in those days in Turkey.

Still, it took quite a while to round up our killer. Agca hung out in places where the Gray Wolves were wont to howl, and those places should have been the first the authorities checked, but they apparently did not. Only when the reward proved too much of a lure was he discovered at the Marmara Coffeehouse in Istanbul.

A young man had to hang out somewhere, didn’t he? The Marmara was one of the best known places in the city where right-thinking men gathered. Snug in Beyazit, the district where Istanbul University lay, it was also within easy walking distance of the Milliyet building.

Everything was convenient. It was as if it had all been planned well in advance.