We shot Turkish envoy, say Armenian rebels

Press, 16 July 1983, Page 10

We shot Turkish envoy, say Armenian rebels

NZPA-Reuter Los Angeles

An Armenian businessman, aged 42, was killed yesterday when a bomb exploded in his car. And in Brussels, the Belgian police are hunting at least one gunman after a Turkish diplomat was shot dead in his car. Two Armenian guerrilla groups claimed responsibility for yesterday’s attack. Armenian organisations have claimed responsibility for attacks on Turks in Los Angeles, maintaining that

Turks massacred 1.5 million Armenians in 1915.

Turkey denies the killings took place. In Los Angeles yesterday officials said that the force of the bomb, which appeared to have been planted behind the driver’s seat, threw Victor Calustian eight metres from his car. A spokesman for the Federal Bureau of Investigation said that an F. 8.1. agent bad gone to the scene. A man with a machinegun opened fire on an Armenian family in a car in

Los Angeles nine days ago, killing a woman and wounding four people. The police said that there did not appear to be any link between the two incidents. In the Brussels incident, a Turkish attache, Dursun Aksoy Ein, was killed in his car just metres from his home in a fashionable district.

As Mr Aksoy left to drive to the embassy, an attacker fired two shots at short range into his head through the left-hand window of the car, which bore distinctive

diplomatic plates. The police said that Mr Aksoy died almost instantly. He leaves a wife and two children.

A man speaking heavilyaccented English called a news agency in Brussels within 30 minutes of the shooting, saying that the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia had carried out the attack.

But in Paris, an anonymous caller claiming to represent the Armenian Revolutionary Army, a previously unnamed faction, said that it had killed Mr Aksoy.