Monday, November 26, 2012

Turkish president Özal may have been poisened

File photo of presidential honour guard carrying coffin of President Turgut Ozal as Turkish generals with drawn swords accompany them during a funeral procession in Ankara April 21, 1993.

An autopsy on the exhumed body late President Turgut Ozal, who led Turkey out of military rule in the 1980s, has revealed evidence of poisoning, a newspaper reported on Monday.
There had long been rumors Ozal, who died of heart failure in 1993 aged 65, was murdered by militants of the "deep state" - a shadowy nationalist strain within the Turkish establishment of the day. He had angered some with his efforts to end the Kurdish conflict and survived on assassination bid in 1988.
His body, dug up last month on the orders of prosecutors investigating suspicions of foul play in his death, contained the banned insecticide DDT and the related compound DDE at ten times the normal level, Today's Zaman cited sources from the state Forensic Medicine Institute (ATK) as saying.
"Ozal was most likely poisoned with four separate substances," the paper reported the sources as saying, also naming the toxic metal cadmium and the radioactive elements americium and polonium as substances found in Ozal's remains.
Forensic institute officials declined to comment. (The picture was taken at Özal's fueral in 1993)


he picture is of Özal's fueral in 1993)

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