An update on this story.
“Turkish doctor details torture of victims at publishing house,” from Agence France Presse, with thanks to Bear:
MALATYA, Turkey: Three Protestants murdered at a Christian publishing house here were tortured for three hours before their assailants slit their throats, a press report said Friday, quoting one of the doctors involved in the grisly case. Dr. Murat Ugras, a spokesman for the Turgut Ozal Medical center, told the daily Hurriyet of hospital surgeons’ fruitless efforts to save Ugur Yuksel, one of the three victims of the massacre at the Zirve (summit) publishing house, which distributed Christian literature.
“He had scores of knife cuts on his thighs, his testicles, his rectum and his back,” Ugras said. “His fingers were sliced to the bone. It is obvious that these wounds had been inflicted to torture him,” he said.
The two others who were killed, Necati Aydin, pastor of Malatya’s tiny Protestant community, and German Tilmann Geske, a Malatya resident with his wife and three children since 2003, were also tortured, press reports said.
The abuse lasted for three hours as the five men detained at the crime scene interrogated the three on their missionary activities, they said.
“We tied their hands and feet and later gagged them,” the mass daily Sabah quoted one of the suspects as telling police.
“Emre slit their throats,” said the youth, who was not identified, referring to Emre Gunaydin, the alleged leader of the gang, who is at the same hospital in serious condition after jumping out of the publishers’ third floor office in a bid to flee police.