Turkish Veteran intelligence expert : "Iran-backed Tawhid-Salam most dangerous terror group, has access to top officials in Turkey."

'Two peas in A pod' 

Turkish Veteran intelligence expert : "Iran-backed Tawhid-Salam most dangerous terror group, has access to top officials in Turkey." HT: TodaysZaman.

Former İstanbul Police Department intelligence bureau chief Ali Fuat Yılmazer has said Iran-linked notorious terrorist organization Tawhid-Salam is “the stealthiest and the most dangerous terrorist organization of recent times” Turkey has ever faced.

He lamented that a painstakingly difficult three-year-long investigation into Iran-backed terrorist organization Tawhid-Salam has been foiled and ridiculed by some government officials, leading most suspects to flee the country.

Yılmazer, who has specialized in fundamentalist and extremist religious terror groups, said it was very difficult to expose this clandestine terror network that has access to top officials in Turkey, yet the police have done a solid and careful investigation to expose the wider network of Iranian agents that has been set up in Turkey and discovered connections to senior government officials.

“The Salam terror investigation included very important details,” Yılmazer said in a live TV interview on Tuesday night.The veteran intelligence expert underlined that Tawhid-Salam is a very important terrorist organization that is backed by Iran.

He also lashed out at Justice Minister Bekir Bozdağ, who ridiculed the investigation, saying: “A group of people say hello with ‘Salam alaikum' [Peace be upon you] and others reciprocate with ‘Alaikum salam' [Also upon you]. On some people's say-so, a terrorist organization was supposedly founded, which is called Tawhid Salam. It is ridiculous.”

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan also adopted a cynical stance about the existence of the terrorist group, raising questions of a cover-up in the government just as Erdoğan tried to do for the corruption scandal that was exposed on Dec. 17.

Former intelligence chief said this is a terrorist organization that was responsible for the assassination of several journalists and academics in the 1990s, including Uğur Mumcu, Bahriye Üçok, Ahmet Taner Kışlalı and several other intellectuals.

The organization is also noted for killing US, Saudi Arabian and Israeli diplomats, as well as Iranian dissidents who took refuge in Turkey.

He said the organization stayed dormant for a while until it was reactivated several years ago and started committing bombing attacks and surveillance activities on sensitive targets in İstanbul. Yılmazer said the investigation cannot be hushed up despite government efforts to keep the investigation from going to court.

According to video footage posted on YouTube, Kamile Yazıcıoğlu, a 49-year-old woman who had fled from her abusive husband, Hüseyin Avni Yazıcıoğlu, reported anti-terror units to the Bursa police, saying that her husband had been working for Iranian intelligence and provided documents as evidence to back up her claims.

She later repeated her testimony to İstanbul anti-terror units in depositions given in March and April 2011. The allegations triggered a secret three-year investigation into Yazıcıoğlu and his accomplices and contacts, both among Turkish officials and Iranian intelligence agents.

One document obtained by the police contains notes Yazıcıoğlu took on a conversation he had with two ruling party deputies, S.K. and H.Ç., in October, 2010 in İstanbul.

These two deputies, from the provinces of Bursa and Muş, told the the Iranian informant the Turkish prime minister's thoughts on the NATO early warning radar system to be deployed in Malatya's Kürecik district as part of NATO's missile defense system.

S.K. says Erdoğan was no longer allowing the Iranian border to be used as a garrison for the US, Israel and Europe and was resisting efforts to that end by Turkey's allies. He said Erdoğan was really strengthening political, economic and military ties with Iran and that he was the radar system as a NATO trap to derail Turkey's ties with Iran.Read the full story here.