965) Turks Call For Justice in Killing

Attache's slaying unsolved after 25 years. He doesn't want his last name published, fearing Armenian terrorists will get him this time. Ercan was a young teenager when three armed men calling themselves Armenian revolutionaries stormed the Turkish embassy in Ottawa, killed a guard and blasted their way into the building with explosives. They were after the Turkish ambassador, who tried to jump out a window to escape. The men grabbed the ambassador's daughter and Ercan's 11-year-old sister instead. They held them for more than five hours. It was March 12, 1985. . .

SECRET HIDEOUT

Ercan's mother burst into his room and took him to a secret hideout inside the embassy compound, where the family was living while working for the Turkish government's department of external affairs.

"How would you feel if someone holds a gun against your family member and you question whether she is going to live or not going to live?" says Ercan, who is now 36. "It leaves a horrible memory in your mind." Ercan's leather jacket is soaked, his wet black hair flat against his head. He has been hanging signs that read "murderers are stil on the loose" and "condemn don't justify" at the corner of the Ottawa River Pkwy. and Island Park Dr.

10 BULLETS FIRED

There, on Aug. 27, 1982, a man carrying a 9-mm Browning handgun walked up to Col. Atilla Altikat, Turkish military attache for Canada, who was stopped at the lights going east on the parkway. The man fired 10 bullets into Altikat's body in the midst of the morning rush hour. RCMP have never caught the killer. Ercan and several members of the Turkish community held a rally on the parkway yesterday to remember the murder and call for justice. "We want them to find who did this and put them in jail," said Yalcin Diker, 46.

29 August 2006
Ottawa Sun