Uğur Mumcu (; 22 August 1942 – 24 January 1993)
um:ag was a

Turkish Turkish may refer to: *a Turkic language spoken by the Turks * of or about Turkey ** Turkish language *** Turkish alphabet ** Turkish people, a Turkic ethnic group and nation *** Turkish citizen, a citizen of Turkey *** Turkish communities and mi ...

investigative journalist for the daily '' Cumhuriyet''. He was assassinated by a bomb placed in his car outside his home.

Biography

Uğur Mumcu was born the third of four siblings in

Kırşehir Kırşehir, formerly Mocissus ( grc, Μωκισσός) and Justinianopolis (Ἰουστινιανούπολις), is a city in Turkey. It is the capital district of the Kırşehir Province. According to the 2000 census, the population of the distri ...

. He went to school in

Ankara Ankara ( , ; ), historically known as Ancyra and Angora, is the capital of Turkey. Located in the central part of Anatolia, the city has a population of 5.1 million in its urban center and over 5.7 million in Ankara Province, maki ...

and in 1961 attended School of Law at Ankara University. Graduating in 1965 he initially began his career practicing law. In 1969 he ended his legal career to return to his alma mater; working as a teaching assistant until 1972. He started to write during university, first in the magazine ''Yön'' and then in several other leftist periodicals. Between 1968 and 1970, he wrote articles on politics for the newspapers '' Akşam'', '' Cumhuriyet'' and ''

Milliyet ''Milliyet'' ( Turkish for "''nationality''") is a Turkish daily newspaper published in Istanbul, Turkey. History and profile ''Milliyet'' came to publishing life at the Nuri Akça press in Babıali, Istanbul as a daily private newspaper on 3 ...

''. Arrested shortly after the 1971 military coup, he was tortured. He was writing for ''

Ortam ''Ortam'' (Turkish: ''Setting'') was a weekly political magazine in Istanbul, Turkey, between April and November 1971. Founded immediately after the military coup on 12 March 1971 the magazine was one of the oppositional publications in the count ...

'' which was a weekly political magazine based in Istanbul when he was arrested. Later, Mumcu wrote that his torturers had told him: "We are the Counter-Guerrilla. Even the President of the Republic cannot touch us." In 1974, Uğur Mumcu started a career as a columnist, with the daily newspaper ''Yeni Ortam'' and from 1975 on, in the daily ''Cumhuriyet'', which he continued until his death.

Research

Uğur Mumcu is hailed as the first investigative journalist of modern Turkey. He published books on current and historical political issues in Turkey. He was investigating the

Kurdistan Workers' Party The Kurdistan Workers' Party or PKK is a Kurdish militant political organization and armed guerrilla movement, which historically operated throughout Kurdistan, but is now primarily based in the mountainous Kurdish-majority regions of south ...

's ties with the

National Intelligence Organization The National Intelligence Organization ( tr, Millî İstihbarat Teşkilatı, MİT) is the state intelligence agency of Turkey. Established in 1965 to replace National Security Service, its aim is to gather information about the current and po ...

(MİT) at the time of his assassination. Shortly before his death, Mumcu was investigating how 100,000 firearms owned by the

Turkish Armed Forces The Turkish Armed Forces (TAF; tr, Türk Silahlı Kuvvetleri, TSK) are the military forces of the Republic of Turkey. Turkish Armed Forces consist of the General Staff, the Land Forces, the Naval Forces and the Air Forces. The current Chi ...

had ended up in the possession of Jalal Talabani, one of the Kurdish leaders of northern Iraq and, as of 2008, president of Iraq. Twenty-five days after the death of Mumcu, General

Eşref Bitlis Eşref Bitlis (Malatya 1933 – Ankara 17 February 1993) was a general in the Turkish Gendarmerie, who died in a controversial plane crash. Background He was born 1933 in the eastern Anatolian city of Malatya, Turkey. He attended the Turkish Mil ...

, who had been investigating the same issue, died in a plane crash, believed to be due to sabotage.Ergenekon linked to Mumcu murder
, ''

Today's Zaman ''Today's Zaman'' (Zaman is Turkish for 'time' or 'age') was an English-language daily newspaper based in Turkey. Established on 17 January 2007, it was the English-language edition of the Turkish daily '' Zaman.'' ''Today's Zaman'' included dom ...

'', 5 August 2008 In his 8 January ''Cumhuriyet'' article, titled ''Ültimatom'', Mumcu emphatically stated that he would soon reveal in a new book the ties between Kurdish nationalists and some intelligence organizations (i.e.,

Abdullah Öcalan Abdullah Öcalan ( ; ; born 4 April 1949), also known as Apo (short for Abdullah in Turkish and Kurdish for "uncle"), is a political prisoner and founding member of the militant Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). Öcalan was based in Syria from ...

and the National Intelligence Organization).Mumcu: "Yakında yayımlanacak bir kitabımda, Kürt milliyetçileri ile istihbarat örgütleri arasındaki ilişkilere ışık tutacak çok ilginç belgeler açıklayacağım!" Quoted in
Alt URL
/ref> According to his son, Özgür, Mumcu had an appointment with retired prosecutor Baki Tuğ on 27 January to learn more about Abdullah Öcalan's suspected ties with the MİT (the state was officially fighting his militant organization, the PKK). Öcalan was detained on 31 March 1972 while studying political sciences at the

University of Ankara Ankara University ( tr, Ankara Üniversitesi) is a public university in Ankara, the capital city of Turkey. It was the first higher education institution founded in Turkey after the formation of the republic in 1923. The university has 40 vocati ...

. Per clause 16/1 of the Martial Law (№ 1402), he was sentenced to three months in jail for participating in a boycott. He was released on 24 October 1972 after the National Intelligence Organization forwarded a message to the prosecutor handling the case, Tuğ, that one of the suspects was one of their agents. Tuğ later said that he could not remember whether the agent was Öcalan, or one of the other suspects.

Assassination

On the morning of 24 January 1993, Mumcu left his home and was killed by a C-4 plastic bomb as he started his car, a

Renault 12 }), the other is the submodel designation TS. Sold as a sedan or a station wagon (TSW), it has a 1.4 litre carburetted C1J (Cléon) engine with and came with either a four- or a five-speed transmission. Australia The Renault 12 won Australia's ...

, license numbered 06 YR 245. There are numerous hypotheses over who was responsible for his murder. Given the various links (at an organizational and personal level) between the Turkish deep state and Turkish armed forces, Counter-Guerrilla, Kurdish forces and the

CIA The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA ), known informally as the Agency and historically as the Company, is a civilian intelligence agency, foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States, officially tasked with gat ...

and

Mossad Mossad ( , ), ; ar, الموساد, al-Mōsād, ; , short for ( he, המוסד למודיעין ולתפקידים מיוחדים, links=no), meaning 'Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations'. is the national intelligence agency ...

, the hypotheses are not necessarily mutually exclusive, especially as Mumcu was investigating some of these links.

Deep state hypothesis

One hypothesis is that he was killed to protect state secrets regarding the PKK. PKK supreme council member

Mustafa Karasu Mustafa Karasu also known as Huseyin Ali is a Deputy Chairman of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), a Kurdish rebel group fighting an armed insurgency against the government of Turkey for an independent Kurdistan. The group is recognised as a ter ...

alleged that Mumcu was killed by the state in order to prevent his publicizing the fact that the PKK was aware it had been infiltrated by the MİT. The mole was Öcalan's pilot, Necati. Karasu alleges that they became aware of his MİT identity in May 1997, and misinformed him. The deep state might have contracted the killing out to JITEM (see below).

Iran hypothesis

His assassination was initially pinned on Iran. According to this hypothesis, Iran's

SAVAMA The Ministry of Intelligence of the Islamic Republic of Iran ( fa, وزارت اطّلاعات جمهوری اسلامی ایران, Vezarat-e Ettela'at Jomhuri-ye Eslami-ye Iran) is the primary intelligence agency of the Islamic Republic of ...

employed the virtually unknown Islamic Movement Organisation ( tr, İslami Hareket Örgütü) to carry out the assassination. Mehmet Ali Şeker, Mehmet Zeki Yıldırım, and Ayhan Usta were taken into custody. However, it was revealed that the police had falsified the date of their capture. The İstanbul police had been conducting an operation targeting Islamist organizations, just before the attack. Its intelligence chief, Hanefi Avcı, said that the attackers left no trace of their affiliation. Rather, they seemed to have been well trained by a state. During the course of the investigation, voluminous documents relating SAVAMA to the

Kurdish Hezbollah Kurdish Hezbollah ( ku, Hizbullahî Kurdî)
, turkishweekly.net known in

were found. In addition, the Ankara police detained three suspects who were found to have stayed at a hotel in Ankara before the attack: Yusuf Karakuş, Abdülhamit Çelik, and Mehmet Şahin. Karakuş said that two Iranian spies were involved in the bombing: Muhammed Reza and Muhsin Karger Azad. Çelik, a.k.a. "Abdullah Gürgen", said he reported to Muhsin Karger Azad. Azad was ostensibly a consulate employee, but secretly an alleged Gladio member. Azad left Turkey after he was " named and shamed" in the newspapers along with other diplomats alleged to be spies. Former Interior Minister Hasan Fehmi Güneş said that there was no doubt in his mind as to SAVAMA's involvement. The alleged motivation for the Iran hypothesis is that Iran's leaders saw secularism as inimical to Islam, and Mumcu had to be killed because he was an outspoken promoter of it. However, others dispute the Iran hypothesis as the assassination coincided with a state visit from Iran to negotiate the passage of a natural gas pipeline from Iran, which was then subject to an embargo by the United States. Tensions flared after the assassination, and the $25 billion pipeline deal fell through.

CIA hypothesis

In an earlier investigation, Mumcu had been on the

's trail. Working on the Mehmet Ali Ağca case, he was the first to discover the connection between the Turkish mafia and the Turkish extreme right. In his ''Cumhuriyet'' column, Mumcu named

Ruzi Nazar Ruzi Nazar (1 January 1917 – 30 April 2015) was an Uzbek nationalist who spent most of his adult career working for the CIA against the Soviet Union. He was born in Soviet Central Asia at the time of the Russian Revolution. After joining the ...

as the CIA's liaison with the far-right Grey Wolves. The CIA's Turkey station chief, Paul Henze, and an American reporter accosted Mumcu to convince him to write that the Pope's assassin worked for Soviets or the Bulgarians, but Mumcu said he would simply follow the information trail. Henze left with an ominous "If you do that, you might find a nice surprise in store", according to his wife, Güldal.

JITEM hypothesis

Abdülkadir Aygan Abdülkadir Aygan (born Uzunhıdır, Suruç, Şanlıurfa Province, 1958) is a former member of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and of the Turkish Gendarmerie's JITEM intelligence unit. He has been described as "the most well-known among PKK mem ...

, a JITEM informant from PKK, said that the assassination was carried out by JITEM operatives including

Cem Ersever Ahmet Cem Ersever (1950 – 4 November 1993) was a commander in the Turkish Gendarmerie, and said to be one of the founders of the Gendarmerie's JITEM intelligence unit. He was assassinated in November 1993.) is a retired Turkish brigadier-general ...

at the behest of General Veli Küçük, who years later, in 2008, was tried for allegedly being a high-ranking member of the

Ergenekon network Ergenekon () was the name given to an alleged clandestine, secular ultra-nationalist organization in Turkey with possible ties to members of the country's military and security forces. The would-be group, named after Ergenekon, a mythical pla ...

. Aygan said that he and Aytekin Özen had a briefcase of about 20 kg of

C-4 (explosive) C-4 or Composition C-4 is a common variety of the plastic explosive family known as Composition C, which uses RDX as its explosive agent. C-4 is composed of explosives, plastic binder, plasticizer to make it malleable, and usually a marker or od ...

, obtained from a Vietnam veteran, and that they had used some of it to assassinate the President of the Diyarbakir Bar, Mustafa Özer. The unnamed American soldier had allegedly given the explosives to the Regional Emergency Governorate ( tr, Olağanüstü Hal Bölge Valiliği) in 1991 or 1992. A confidential forensic report, dated 29 January 1993, was prepared by the chief of the Criminal Police Laboratory, Muhittin Kaya. It wrote that the plastic explosive weighed approximately 2.5 kg and contained

RDX RDX (abbreviation of "Research Department eXplosive") or hexogen, among other names, is an organic compound with the formula (O2N2CH2)3. It is a white solid without smell or taste, widely used as an explosive. Chemically, it is classified as a n ...

, as used in C-4s. However, it contradicted itself in explaining its origin, saying Czechoslovakia in the body, and the United States in the appendix.

MOSSAD hypothesis

Uğur Mumcu's brother, Ceyhan Mumcu, finds the evidence for the JITEM/Ergenekon allegations weak. He suspects

Israel Israel (; he, יִשְׂרָאֵל, ; ar, إِسْرَائِيل, ), officially the State of Israel ( he, מְדִינַת יִשְׂרָאֵל, label=none, translit=Medīnat Yīsrāʾēl; ), is a country in Western Asia. It is situated ...

's involvement since it supported Barzani and Talabani in the

Gulf War The Gulf War was a 1990–1991 armed campaign waged by a 35-country military coalition in response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Spearheaded by the United States, the coalition's efforts against Iraq were carried out in two key phases: ...

. Israel's ambassador to Turkey had repeatedly requested to have lunch with Uğur, the only journalist to write about the dealings. Uğur agreed on the condition that he be allowed to bring a witness. The ambassador rejected the offer, and Mumcu died shortly thereafter. Ceyhan Mumcu said his suspicions were supported by evidence uncovered in the Ergenekon investigation. A report seized from retired General Veli Küçük, dated 2 February 1993 and purportedly emanating from the MİT, says that the CIA and Israel's OADNA were involved.

Personal life

Uğur Mumcu was survived by his wife Güldal, and their children Özgür and Özge Mumcu. Güldal Mumcu and her children established the Uğur Mumcu Investigative Journalism Foundation ( tr, Uğur Mumcu Araştırmacı Gazetecilik Vakfı) in October 1994. Numerous parks, streets and monuments have been named after him.

Bibliography

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