At an event held yesterday in Istanbul to commemorate the murder of Hrant Dink in 2007, panel members said that minorities, including Armenian citizens, feel threatened in Turkey.

They pointed to a recent uptick of attacks against Armenians and others as a basis for their concern.

The event “Minorities Targeted: Cage Plot”, was organized by a group called “Hrant’s Friends”.

One of the panellists, Hayko Bağdat, a member of the Armenian community who hosts a local TV show, listed some recent events, including the murder of an elderly Armenian woman in Samatya and that of a computer science teacher, causing the heightened concern.

“Are these isolated events?” Bağdat asked. “Maybe they are in this big city where murders happen every day, but if we have doubts that means they are serious.”

Bağdat also noted the Cage Operation Action Plan, purportedly prepared by the Naval Forces Command, which sought to intimidate and murder Turkey's prominent non-Muslim figures to put domestic and international pressure on the government. The plan called the killings of Dink, Catholic priest Father Andrea Santoro and three Christians in Malatya an “operation.”

  Orhan Kemal Cengiz, another panellist and a lawyer representing the plaintiffs in the Malatya murder case, said that there are pieces of information that the public has about all those events, but it is difficult to put them together and see the whole picture, according to a report in yesterday’s Today’s Zaman.