intelligence Archives

Only When #Israel have issue with #Turkey they Remember to recognize #ArmenianGenocide

May 16, 2018 By administrator

Israel’s Intelligence Minister sees no reason not to recognize Armenian Genocide

YEREVAN, MAY 16,. Transportation and Intelligence Minister of Israel Yisrael Katz said Wednesday he sees “no reason morally and historically” not to recognize the Armenian Genocide, adding that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan “is truly an enemy”, ARMENPRESS reports, citing ynetnews.com.

In an interview with Ynet on Wednesday, Minister Yisrael Katz called to support a bill proposed by MP Itzik Shmuli calling on the Israeli government to officially recognize the Armenian Genocide—the Ottoman government’s systematic extermination of 1.5 million Armenians, mostly citizens within the Ottoman Empire, from 1915 to 1917.

Katz also slammed the Turkish president, saying Erdoğan “hates the State of Israel. He’s a man of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas’s mother-movement. Every time something happens in Gaza, he gets worked up and acts in a very extreme manner.”

“This is a man who slaughters the Kurdish minority in Turkey and now in Syria,” Katz went on to say. “He took 140,000 Kurds and transferred them from the region to replace them with other residents. The man acts cruelly and then preaches us. He’s the last one that can preach us, but the first one to do so.”

In the light of the escalation of relations between Turkey and Israel as a result of Gaza Strip developments, the issue of recognition of the Armenian Genocide has again appeared on the agenda of the Knesset. MPs Itzik Shmuli and Amir Ohana have announced that they will present a bill recognizing the massacre of 1.5 million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire as genocide.

Karabakh: The director of US intelligence feared an escalation of violence

February 10, 2016 By administrator

arton121952-480x270 The current economic difficulties in Azerbaijan caused by the oil price fall may increase the risk of a further escalation of violence in the Nagorno-Karabakh feared yesterday the senior US intelligence.

“Baku is in full military buildup while the deteriorating economic conditions in Azerbaijan raise the possibility that the conflict escalates in 2016,” warned the US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, in its annual assessment of threats United States.

“The aversion of Azerbaijan to publicly renounce claim the Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia’s reluctance to give up the territory it controls continue to complicate any possibility of peaceful solution,” said Clapper.

Heavily dependent on oil revenues, Azerbaijan suffers increasingly from the collapse of world oil prices. The Azerbaijani national currency, the manat, has lost more than half its value against the US dollar last year, despite the fact that the Baku authorities spent nearly $ 9 billion to maintain its rate exchange.

Last month, the agency Standard and Poor’s lowered the rating of Azerbaijan by one notch and said now fear the recession of Azerbaijan’s economy this year, after more than a decade of rapid growth driven by oil.

Recently, the country’s economic problems have caused rare demonstrations in several cities of Azerbaijan. The demonstrators marched following the deterioration of living conditions, including the increase in bread prices. These rallies were fueled speculation in Armenia that the government of President Ilham Aliev could intensify violations of the cease-fire in the Karabakh conflict zone to “distract” the Azerbaijanis dissatisfied with his failed economic policies.

Last year already, along the “line of contact” around Karabakh and the Armenian-Azerbaijani border was a sharp increase of the fighting.

The United States and Russia and France, the two other mediating powers trying to negotiate an Armenian-Azerbaijani peace agreement, have expressed concern that climbing throughout 2015. “There is no military solution to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict “, said the US Secretary of State John Kerry, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and French Minister for European Affairs Harlem Desir in a joint statement issued in December.

Driven by massive oil revenues, which totaled more than $ 116 billion since 2001, Aliev has for years talked about a “widening gap” between Armenia and Azerbaijan which he said, would in Baku to regain control of Nagorno-Karabakh. A considerable portion of these revenues were spent on the acquisition of large amounts of offensive weapons.

Azerbaijan had intended to spend the equivalent of $ 1.2 billion for its defense and security in 2016. There are only four years, Aliyev stated that military expenditures of Azerbaijan exceeded the entire State budget of Armenia (about $ 3 billion).

The collapse of the Azerbaijani currency also resulted in some embarrassing economic statistics for Aliev: less than $ 300 a month, the official average salary in Azerbaijan is now much lower, in dollar terms, than the poorest in Armenia.

Wednesday, February 10, 2016,
Claire © armenews.com

British intelligence ‘spied on German Greek plans’ – Wikileaks

July 2, 2015 By administrator

By Matthew Holehouse, in Brussels

German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s personal mobile phone may have been monitored by the US (Reuters)

(The telegraph) British intelligence spied on German leaders as they discussed how to bailout Greece in 2011, newly released cables purport to show.

British officials passed intelligence to the US National Security Agency on proposals by Germany to ask developing nations to help rescue Athens.

• Greece crisis live – Polls suggest vote will go down to the wire

The claim was made by Wikileaks, the anti-secrecy website, in the latest release of US cables from the US spy agency. The website did not give a source for the documents, but it follows the leak of thousands of cables by Edward Snowden, a former contractor who is now living in Russia.

The documents also appear to show that the US was intercepting calls of Angela Merkel and a raft of her senior officials.

Reports two years ago that Merkel’s phone had been targeted by the NSA prompted diplomatic friction between Berlin and Washington, but German prosecutors recently dropped their probe into the case citing lack of concrete evidence.

WikiLeaks said the new, partially-redacted list of 69 phone and fax numbers belonged to senior officials at Germany’s economy and finance ministries, among others.

• Wikileaks documents reveal US spied on French leaders

Sigmar Gabriel, the economy minister, and Oskar Lafontaine the former finance minister, are on the list. Suddeutsche Zeitung said some of the numbers are still active.

Wikileaks published two documents it claimed were summaries of conversations intercepted – one involving Merkel and a second involving a senior aide – concerning the Greek debt crisis.

A conversation involving Niklaus Meyer-Landrut was intercepted by British intelligence, which passed it to the NSA, according to WikiLeaks. In it, Mr Meyer-Landrut discloses that “the Germans would support a special IMF fund into which the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) nations would pool funds for the purpose of bolstering eurozone bailout activities”.

The revelations about US espionage in Germany provoked outrage in a country still haunted by the memory of mass surveillance by the East German Stasi.

In 2013 Mrs Merkel publicly rebuked President Obama over the affair. “Spying between friends, that’s just not done,” she said.

Reuters Exclusive: Turkish intelligence helped ship arms to Syrian Islamist rebel areas

May 21, 2015 By administrator

ADANA, Turkey | By Humeyra Pamuk and Nick Tattersall

A locally made shell is launched by rebel fighters towards forces loyal to Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad at the frontline in al-Breij district of Aleppo December 10, 2014. REUTERS/Sultan Kitaz

Turkey’s state intelligence agency helped deliver arms to parts of Syria under Islamist rebel control during late 2013 and early 2014, according to a prosecutor and court testimony from gendarmerie officers seen by Reuters.

The witness testimony contradicts Turkey’s denials that it sent arms to Syrian rebels and, by extension, contributed to the rise of Islamic State, now a major concern for the NATO member.

Syria and some of Turkey’s Western allies say Turkey, in its haste to see President Bashar al-Assad toppled, let fighters and arms over the border, some of whom went on to join the Islamic State militant group which has carved a self-declared caliphate out of parts of Syria and Iraq.

Ankara has denied arming Syria’s rebels or assisting hardline Islamists. Diplomats and Turkish officials say it has in recent months imposed tighter controls on its borders.

Testimony from gendarmerie officers in court documents reviewed by Reuters allege that rocket parts, ammunition and semi-finished mortar shells were carried in trucks accompanied by state intelligence agency (MIT) officials more than a year ago to parts of Syria under Islamist control.

Four trucks were searched in the southern province of Adana in raids by police and gendarmerie, one in November 2013 and the three others in January 2014, on the orders of prosecutors acting on tip-offs that they were carrying weapons, according to testimony from the prosecutors, who now themselves face trial.

While the first truck was seized, the three others were allowed to continue their journey after MIT officials accompanying the cargo threatened police and physically resisted the search, according to the testimony and prosecutor’s report.

President Tayyip Erdogan has said the three trucks stopped on Jan. 19 belonged to MIT and were carrying aid.

“Our investigation has shown that some state officials have helped these people deliver the shipments,” prosecutor Ozcan Sisman, who ordered the search of the first truck on Nov. 7 2013 after a tip-off that it was carrying weapons illegally, told Reuters in a interview on May 4 in Adana.

Both Sisman and Takci have since been detained on the orders of state prosecutors and face provisional charges, pending a full indictment, of carrying out an illegal search.

The request for Sisman’s arrest, issued by the Supreme Board of Judges and Prosecutors (HSYK) and also seen by Reuters, accuses him of revealing state secrets and tarnishing the government by portraying it as aiding terrorist groups.

Sisman and Takci deny the charges.

“It is not possible to explain this process, which has become a total massacre of the law,” Alp Deger Tanriverdi, a lawyer representing both Takci and Sisman, told Reuters.

“Something that is a crime cannot possibly be a state secret.”

More than 30 gendarmerie officers involved in the Jan. 1 attempted search and the events of Jan. 19 also face charges such as military espionage and attempting to overthrow the government, according to an April 2015 Istanbul court document.

An official in Erdogan’s office said Erdogan had made his position clear on the issue. Several government officials contacted by Reuters declined to comment further. MIT officials could not immediately be reached.

“I want to reiterate our official line here, which has been stated over and over again ever since this crisis started by our prime minister, president and foreign minister, that Turkey has never sent weapons to any group in Syria,” Erdogan’s spokesman Ibrahim Kalin said on Wednesday at an event in Washington.

Erdogan has said prosecutors had no authority to search MIT vehicles and were part of what he calls a “parallel state” run by his political enemies and bent on discrediting the government.

“Who were those who tried to stop MIT trucks in Adana while we were trying to send humanitarian aid to Turkmens?,” Erdogan said in a television interview last August.

“Parallel judiciary and parallel security … The prosecutor hops onto the truck and carries out a search. You can’t search an MIT truck, you have no authority.”

‘TARNISHING THE GOVERNMENT’

One of the truck drivers, Murat Kislakci, was quoted as saying the cargo he carried on Jan. 19 was loaded from a foreign plane at Ankara airport and that he had carried similar shipments before. Reuters was unable to contact Kislakci.

Witness testimony seen by Reuters from a gendarme involved in a Jan. 1, 2014 attempt to search another truck said MIT officials had talked about weapons shipments to Syrian rebels from depots on the border. Reuters was unable to confirm this.

At the time of the searches, the Syrian side of the border in Hatay province, which neighbors Adana, was controlled by hardline Islamist rebel group Ahrar al-Sham.

The Salafist group included commanders such as Abu Khaled al-Soury, also known as Abu Omair al-Shamy, who fought alongside al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden and was close to its current chief Ayman al-Zawahiri. Al-Soury was killed in by a suicide attack in Syrian city of Aleppo in February 2014.

A court ruling calling for the arrest of three people in connection with the truck stopped in November 2013 said it was loaded with metal pipes manufactured in the Turkish city of Konya which were identified as semi-finished parts of mortars.

The document also cites truck driver Lutfi Karakaya as saying he had twice carried the same shipment and delivered it to a field around 200 meters beyond a military outpost in Reyhanli, a stone’s throw from Syria.

The court order for Karakaya’s arrest, seen by Reuters, cited a police investigation which said that the weapons parts seized that day were destined for “a camp used by the al Qaeda terrorist organization on the Syrian border”.

Reuters was unable to interview Karakaya or to independently confirm the final intended destination of the cargo.

Sisman said it was a tip-off from the police that prompted him to order the thwarted search on Jan. 1, 2014.

“I did not want to prevent its passage if it belonged to MIT and carried aid but we had a tip off saying this truck was carrying weapons. We were obliged to investigate,” he said.

(Additional reporting by Ercan Gurses in Ankara; Editing by Nick Tattersall and Anna Willard)

Turkey, Former police intel chief testifies as suspect in Dink murder case

October 2, 2014 By administrator

Ramazan Akyürek, a former police chief who also served as the head of the National Police Department’s intelligence unit, has testified as a suspect in an investigation into the 2007 killing of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, news reports said on Thursday.

Akyürek, who was the head of police intelligence at the time of the murder, was suspended from duty in March following accusations of negligence in preventing the killing.

Akyürek’s name frequently came up during the trial of the suspects accused of having plotted to kill Dink, who was shot and killed in 2007 by Ogün Samast, an ultranationalist teenager. Akyürek has been accused of having links to Erhan Tuncel, a suspect accused of soliciting Samast to murder Dink.

Akyürek testified to Prosecutor Yusuf Doğan for four hours, the private Doğan news agency said. He was released following his testimony.