With 3 Turkish Hostages Counting Down 72 Hours to Execution...
This from AP through the Times:
Turkish police fired tear gas at more than 150 left-wing demonstrators who hurled rocks and tried to smash through a barricade in Ankara on Saturday, just hours before President Bush arrived for a NATO summit.No jokes here: what does it mean when we have a president that is so hated throughout the world that wherever he goes, he endangers relatively innocent bystanders? This is not a success story.
Police used bomb-detecting dogs to comb the area around the hotel where Bush is expected to stay, and security officials closed streets throughout the capital, part of a massive operation following Thursday bombings in Ankara and Istanbul that killed four people and injured 17.
Also Saturday, supporters of Jordanian-born militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi said they had kidnapped three Turkish workers in Iraq, Arab TV station al-Jazeera reported.
An al-Jazeera employee told The Associated Press that the group threatened to behead the hostages within 72 hours if Turkish companies did not withdraw from Iraq.
Bush is unpopular in Turkey, where the overwhelming majority of the public opposed the war in neighboring Iraq. If Turkish hostages were executed in Iraq, that could considerably increase tensions.
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