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Cage plan mentioned in Poyrazköy indictment
The subversive plans are part of the Cage Operation Action Plan, allegedly drafted by active duty naval officers. The plan aimed to assassinate Turkey’s prominent non-Muslim figures and put the blame for the killings on the AK Party. The desired result was an increase in internal and external pressure on the party, leading to diminishing public support for the government.
The Cage plan also contained a frightening planned act of terror against young students visiting the Rahmi M. Koç Museum. According to the plan, several blocks of TNT and other explosives placed at the bottom of a submarine exhibited at the museum would be detonated while a large group of students was visiting the museum.
After the discovery of explosives in the submarine, a military investigation announced that the explosives had been forgotten by commandos. Ergenekon prosecutors, however, decided that the findings of the military investigation were too weak to ease concerns over the discovery of explosives at a museum. The prosecutors examined the submarine at the museum and reached the conclusion that it was not possible for the commandos to forget a large amount of explosives in a submarine.
Cage documents noted that the explosion should occur on a day when the museum was visited by a large group of students. “Materials to be planted at the museum have reached operators. We should increase the number of visitors to the museum. C.G. will tell us when the visitor numbers at the museum are at their highest. We should increase publicity and activities [about the museum] in schools. Students are the most important elements of this project. We should confirm the day of the operation,” read one of the documents.
According to the Poyrazköy indictment, subscribers to the Turkish-Armenian biweekly Agos newspaper were to be posted on a number of Web sites in line with the Cage plan. The editor-in-chief of Agos, Hrant Dink, was shot dead in 2007 by an ultranationalist Turkish teenager. Letters that included threatening messages were to be sent to Agos subscribers, and they were also to receive threatening phone calls. Similar messages were to be written on a number of walls of buildings on the Princes’ Islands, home to hundreds of non-Muslim families.
The Poyrazköy indictment also recalls that threatening letters were sent by unidentified individuals to Armenians residing in Turkey. According to the document, the letters could be part of the Cage plan.
The new indictment also revealed that one of the contributors to the Cage plan was the West Study Group (BÇG), a clandestine unit formed within the army. According to the indictment, the BÇG has remained active since the Feb. 28, 1997 post-modern coup and contributed to the preparation of the Cage plan and the Action Plan to Fight Reactionaryism, another suspected military plot aimed at destroying the AK Party government.
The BÇG, which categorized politicians, intellectuals, soldiers and bureaucrats, was formed within the military during the Feb. 28, 1997 coup -- in which the military overthrew a coalition government led by a now-defunct conservative party -- and continued its existence as a civilian body after the collapse of the Refah-Yol government (a coalition of the Welfare Party [RP] and the True Path Party [DYP]) in June 1997.
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