Ugur Mumcu

Uğur Mumcu (August 22, 1942 – January 24, 1993) was an intrepid Turkish Kemalist intellectual, investigative journalist and columnist for the leading liberal broadsheet, Cumhuriyet. He was killed one morning outside his home by a bomb placed in his car on January 24,1993.

Uğur Mumcu was born as the third of four siblings in Kırşehir, where his father was working. He went to school in Ankara and in 1961 attended School of Law at Ankara University.After graduation in 1965, he practiced law for a while. He then visited England to learn English and upon his return to Turkey worked as a teaching assistant at Ankara University from 1969 to 1972.

He started to write during university, first in the magazine Yön and then in several other leftist periodicals. Between 1968 and 1970, he wrote articles on politics for the newspapers Akşam, Cumhuriyet and Milliyet.

Arrested shortly after the 1971 military coup, he was tortured. Later, Mumcu wrote that his torturers had told him: "We are the Counter-Guerrilla. Even the President of the Republic cannot touch us."

In 1974, UÄŸur Mumcu started a career as a columnist,with the periodical Yeni Ortam and from 1975 on, in the broadsheet newspaper Cumhuriyet, which he continued until his death (apart from a few months in 1991 when he was in dispute with the management).

UÄŸur Mumcu also published books on current and historical political issues of Turkey. He was investigating the Kurdistan Workers' Party at the time of his assassination.

On the morning of 24 January 1993, he 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.His assassination was initially pinned on Iran.Of the purported Iran–Islamic Movement Organisation (Turkish: İslami Hareket Örgütü) connection, İstanbul's police intelligence chief, Hanefi Avcı, said that the attackers left no trace of their affiliation. Rather, they seemed to have been well trained—by a state.After becoming famous for exposing corruption in the 90s, Avcı gave testimony as a witness in the 2008 Ergenekon investigations.The assassination coincided with a state visit from Iran to negotiate the passage of a natural gas pipeline from Iran, which was then subject to an embargo by the United States. Tensions flared after the assassination, and the $25 billion pipeline deal fell through.

Shortly before his death, Mumcu was investigating how 100,000 firearms owned by the Turkish Armed Forces ended up in the hands of Jalal Talabani, one of the Kurdish leaders of northern Iraq and, as of 2008, president of Iraq. 25 days after Mumcu, General EÅŸref Bitlis, who was investigating on the same issue, died in a plane accident, believed to be by sabotage.In his 8 January Cumhuriyet article, titled Ãœltimatom, Mumcu emphatically stated that he would soon reveal in a new book the ties between Kurdish nationalists and some intelligence organizations.

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 National Intelligence Organization (the state was officially fighting his militant organization, the pkk).ocalan was detained on 31 March 1972 while studying political sciences at the University of Ankara. Per clause 16/1 of the Martial Law (№ 1402), he was sentenced to three months in jail for participating in a boycott. 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 an earlier investigation, Mumcu had been on the CIA's trail. Working on the Mehmet Ali AÄŸca case, he was the first to discover the connection between the Turkish mafia and the Turkish extreme left.In his Cumhuriyet column, Mumcu named Ruzi Nazar as the CIA's liaison with the far-right Grey Wolves.The CIA's Turkey station chief, Paul Henze, and an American reporter accosted Mumcu to convince him to write that the Pope's assassin worked for Soviets or the Bulgarians, but Mumcu said he would simply follow the information trail. Henze left with an ominous "If you do that, you might find a nice surprise in store", according to his wife, Guldal.

Uğur Mumcu is survived by his wife Güldal, and their children Özgür and Özge Mumcu. Güldal Mumcu and her children established the Uğur Mumcu Investigative Journalism Foundation (um:ag, Turkish: Uğur Mumcu Araştırmacı Gazetecilik Vakfı) in October 1994.Güldal Mumcu is currently a member of Turkish parliament.