The young man who murdered father Andrea Santoro, yesterday, with a gunshot while he was praying in the parish church of Saint Mary in Trabzon, a Turkish city on the Black Sea, was not alone. Behind him "there is certainly someone else”, who is interested in creating "a climate of destabilisation" in a country which is trying to join the EU. This is the firm belief of mgr. Ruggero Franceschini, archbishop of Izmir and president of the Turkish Bishops Conference. Mgr. Franceschini who will go with the nuncio, on a date to be established, to Trabzon where a funereal mass will be held before the body leaves for Rome does not believe in the assumption made by the press, i.e. that behind the death of father Andrea there may be the mafia of the prostitutes who "the priest used to rescue, by giving shelter also to those coming from the neighbouring countries". “I think he explained there may be a connection with this wave of violence that has come out of the cartoons on Muhammad and the Koran, which didn’t make anyone laugh. There’s a lot of concern. It had never happened before in Turkey but a few years ago. We were going through a time of serenity and communication”. (to be continued)
