Uğur Mumcu

Uğur Mumcu (22 August 1942 – 24 January 1993) was a Turkish investigative journalist for the daily Cumhuriyet.

He was assassinated by a bomb placed in his car outside his home.

Uğur Mumcu was born the third of four siblings in Kırşehir.

He went to school in Ankara and in 1961 attended School of Law at Ankara University.

Graduating in 1965 he initially began his career practicing law.

Between 1968 and 1970, he wrote articles on politics for the newspapers Akşam, Cumhuriyet and Milliyet.

In 1969 he ended his legal career to return to his alma mater; working as a teaching assistant until 1972.

He started to write during university, first in the magazine Yön and then in several other leftist periodicals.

Arrested shortly after the 1971 military coup, he was tortured.

He was writing for Ortam, which was a weekly political magazine based in Istanbul when he was arrested.

Later, Mumcu wrote that his torturers had told him: "We are the Counter-Guerrilla. Even the President of the Republic cannot touch us."

Öcalan was detained on 31 March 1972 while studying political sciences at the Ankara University.

He was released on 24 October 1972 after the National Intelligence Organization forwarded a message to the prosecutor handling the case, Tuğ, that one of the suspects was one of their agents.

Tuğ later said that he could not remember whether the agent was Öcalan or one of the other suspects.

In 1974, Uğur Mumcu started a career as a columnist, with the daily newspaper Yeni Ortam and from 1975 on, in the daily Cumhuriyet, which he continued until his death.

Uğur Mumcu is hailed as the first investigative journalist of modern Turkey.

He published books on current and historical political issues in Turkey.

He was investigating the Kurdistan Workers' Party's ties with the National Intelligence Organization (MİT) at the time of his assassination.

Per clause 16/1 of the 1980 Martial Law (№ 1402), he was sentenced to three months in jail for participating in a boycott.

On the morning of 24 January 1993, Mumcu left his home and was killed by a C-4 plastic bomb as he started his car, a Renault 12, license numbered 06 YR 245.

There are numerous hypotheses over who was responsible for his murder.

Given the various links (at an organizational and personal level) between the Turkish deep state and Turkish armed forces, Counter-Guerrilla, Kurdish forces and the CIA and Mossad, the hypotheses are not necessarily mutually exclusive, especially as Mumcu was investigating some of these links.

One hypothesis is that he was killed to protect state secrets regarding the PKK.

PKK supreme council member Mustafa Karasu alleged that Mumcu was killed by the state in order to prevent his publicizing the fact that the PKK was aware it had been infiltrated by the MİT.

The mole was Öcalan's pilot, Necati.

Karasu alleges that they became aware of his MİT identity in May 1997, and misinformed him.

The deep state might have contracted the killing out to JITEM (see below).

His assassination was initially pinned on Iran.

According to this hypothesis, Iran's Ministry of Intelligence employed the virtually unknown Islamic Movement Organisation (İslami Hareket Örgütü) to carry out the assassination.

Mehmet Ali Şeker, Mehmet Zeki Yıldırım, and Ayhan Usta were taken into custody.

However, it was revealed that the police had falsified the date of their capture.

The İstanbul police had been conducting an operation targeting Islamist organizations just before the attack.

Its intelligence chief, Hanefi Avcı, said that the attackers left no trace of their affiliation; they seemed to have been well-trained by a state.

During the investigation, voluminous documents relating Iran to the Sunni organisation Kurdish Hezbollah (Kurdish Sofîk) were found.

In addition, the Ankara police detained three suspects who were found to have stayed at a hotel in Ankara before the attack: Yusuf Karakuş, Abdülhamit Çelik, and Mehmet Şahin.

Karakuş said that two Iranian spies were involved in the bombing: Muhammed Reza and Muhsin Karger Azad.

Shortly before his death, Mumcu was investigating how 100,000 firearms owned by the Turkish Armed Forces had ended up in the possession of Jalal Talabani, one of the Kurdish leaders of Kurdistan Region, who later held the office of President of Iraq from 2005 to 2014.

Twenty-five days after the death of Mumcu, General Eşref Bitlis, who had been investigating the same issue, died in a plane crash, believed to be due to sabotage.

In his 8 January Cumhuriyet article, titled Ültimatom, Mumcu emphatically stated that he would soon reveal in a new book the ties between Kurdish nationalists and some intelligence organizations (i.e., Abdullah Öcalan and the National Intelligence Organization).

According to his son Özgür, Mumcu had an appointment with retired prosecutor Baki Tuğ on 27 January to learn more about Abdullah Öcalan's suspected ties with the MİT; the state was officially fighting his militant organization, the Kurdistan Workers' Party.