28 January 1921: Mustafa Suphi was the founder of the Communist Party of Turkey. Suphi and his 14 comrades were assassinated while they were being sent to Erzurum for trial.[3]
2 April 1948: Sabahattin Ali was a writer and critical intellectual who was assassinated at the Bulgarian border while fleeing from Turkey. He had been imprisoned by the Turkish government.
27 January 1973: Mehmet Baydar was Turkey's consul general in Los Angeles, and Bahadır Demir his deputy, in 1973. Shot in a Santa Barbara hotel by Kourken Yanigian who had invited them there on the pretext of a donating a painting to the Turkish government. Yanigian, sentenced to life imprisonment, was amnestied in 1984 and died shortly afterwards.
The event is considered to be the first in a decade-long chain of organized attacks against Turkish diplomats by Armenianmilitant groups.[4]
24 October 1975: Turkey's Ambassador to France İsmail Erez and his driver Talip Yener were murdered by Armenian militants in the vicinity of the Embassy in Paris by car bomb.[6][7]
11 March 1978: Art historian, scholar, literary critic and translator. He was serving on a committee investigating right-wing terror squads at his university.[8] Shot dead in his car with his wife severely wounded by Rıfat Yıldırım, Üzeyir Bayraklı and by another man nicknamed "Ahmet" who were ultra-nationalists and believed to have been directly funded by the Turkish state. A tribunal found Abdullah Çatlı responsible but nobody was punished as a result.
24 March 1978: Public prosecutor who wrote a report for Prime Minister Bülent Ecevit accusing clandestine groups (later named as Ergenekon) of creating chaos in order to lay the ground for a military takeover.[9]Haluk Kırcı, a Grey Wolves activist, was implicated in his assassination.
23 March 1979: Islamist political and social activist. Shot to death outside of Istanbul's Fatih Mosque by nationalist gunmen while leaving Friday prayers.
11 April 1980: TV producer, writer and columnist of the newspaper Cumhuriyet. Gunned down in front of his home in Istanbul as he was about to get in his car.[13]
27 May 1980: briefly customs and tobacco minister of Turkey and a right wing politician. Murdered in front of his car while putting out baggage. Radical leftist militant group Dev Sol (Revolutionary Left) claimed responsibility for the attack.
19 July 1980: Prime Minister of Turkey in 1971-1972, for almost 14 months. Shot to death by two gunmen in Istanbul. Radical leftist militant group Dev Sol (Revolutionary Left) claimed responsibility for the attack.
31 January 1990: Professor of law at Ankara University, Faculty of Political science; author of books on Kemalism; elected head of the Ankara Bar Association 1969, columnist of the newspaper Cumhuriyet. Shot in the back of his head in front of his house.[14][15]
7 March 1990: Journalist, editor-in-chief and chief columnist of the liberal rightist daily Hürriyet. Shot to death in front of his house. Case remains unresolved.
4 September 1990: Former member of Islamic clergy who became a critic of Islam and advocate of atheism. Shot to death in front of his house. Case remains unresolved.
24 January 1993: Research journalist, columnist of the major newspaper Cumhuriyet. Killed in front of his home in Ankara by a bomb installed in his car.[18]
11 January 1995: prominent art critic, writer, poet, columnist for the daily Cumhuriyet and one of the founders of the Istanbul International Film Festival, died of injuries he suffered during a bomb attack perpetrated by PKK at a hotel in Istanbul.[19]
8 January 1996: Metin GoktepeDOC, a left wing journalist of Evrensel was beaten to death by Turkish police while covering civil unrest in the Gazi district of Istanbul. The first case in Turkey where the police were convicted of murder.
9 January 1996: Businessman and a member of the Sabancı family in the second generation. Gunned down in his office in Sabancı Towers, Levent, Istanbul, by assassins hired by the leftist armed group DHKP-C. The general manager of ToyotaSA and a secretary was also killed. They had been given access to the building by Fehriye Erdal, a female member of DHKP-C, who was an employee at that time.
21 October 1999: Academic, writer. politician, former Minister of Culture and columnist of the newspaper Cumhuriyet. Killed in Ankara by a bomb placed on the windshield of his car.[20][21]
24 January 2001: Diyarbakır Police Chief, his driver and four policemen escorting him were shot dead in an attack after they left Diyarbakır Police Department building. Radical Islamic group known as Kurdish Hezbollah was suspected.[22]
25 August 2001: A prominent Turkish Jewish businessman and a founding partner of the Alarko group of companies. He was stabbed to death in the cemetery of the historic Istanbul quarter of Eyüp.
5 February 2006: Father Andrea Santoro was a Roman Catholic priest, murdered in the Santa Maria Church in Trabzon where he served as a member of the Catholic Church's Fidei donum missionary program.
On 5 September 2006 he was shot dead from behind while kneeling in prayer in the church. A witness heard the perpetrator shouting "Allahu Akbar". A 16-year-old high school student was arrested two days after the shooting carrying a 9mm pistol. An investigation by the Air Force Office of Special Investigations on stolen weaponry in Iraq revealed that the gun was of the same type used in the supposedly Islamist attack on the Turkish Council of State in 2006.
19 January 2007: Armenian-Turkish journalist and editor-in-chief of the weekly Armenian and Turkish language newspaper Agos in Istanbul. Shot dead in front of his newspaper's office.[24]
18 April 2007. Three Christian leaders assassinated, two Turkish Pastors and a German missionary.
İhya Balak
16 November 2007. Director of Milli Piyango, the Turkish National Lottery, was assassinated in his office by an ex-inspector of his directorate.
Ahmet Yıldız
July 2008: "the victim of what sociologists say is the first gay honor killing in Turkey to surface publicly".[25][26][27][28]
Cihan Hayırsevener
19 December 2009: founder and editor of the daily Güney Marmara’da Yaşam, was shot in a street in Bandırma, Balıkesir Province and died later that day at a hospital in Bursa. He had reported on corruption charges involving the owners of İlkhaber, another daily in the town.[29][30]
^"Adding Up to an Epidemic". TIME. 3 November 1975. Archived from the original on 19 July 2010. Retrieved 27 August 2008. Two days after the Vienna murder, gunmen in Paris opened fire on a car belonging to the Turkish ambassador to France, Ismail Erez, 56, who died along with his chauffeur.
^Ahmad, Feroz. The Making of Modern Turkey, (London: Routledge, 1993), 171.
^"Başlarken..."Milliyet (in Turkish). 24 January 1999. Archived from the original on 15 September 2008. Retrieved 27 August 2008.
^Aydemir, Kadir (14 July 2006). "Bir 'Garip' Kaftancıoğlu". Kitap. Radikal (in Turkish). Archived from the original on 8 June 2008. Retrieved 27 August 2008. 11 Nisan 1980'de Mecidiyeköy'de, küçücük çocuğunu okula götürürken, gün ortasında, kızının gözleri önünde katledilen bu değerli aydınımız
DOC, a left wing journalist of Evrensel was beaten to death by Turkish police while covering civil unrest in the Gazi district of Istanbul. The first case in Turkey where the police were convicted of murder.