At least thirteen people were arrested last week in Turkey as part of an investigation into an alleged plan to assassinate Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk. Among those arrested, according to various international newspaper reports, is Kemal Kerincisz, the lawyer who tried to prosecute Pamuk as well as novelists Elif Shafak and Perhian Magden on charges of "insulting Turkishness."
The Turkish press has reported that the assassination of Pamuk would have been part of a campaign of violence leading to a planned military coup next year. The arrests were made after an investigation following the discovery of a weapons cache in Istanbul last year yielded evidence of the plan to kill the author as well as stage a series of bombings during the next year.
Many of the details of the arrests are not yet known; media coverage in Turkey has been restricted while the investigation is underway.
Pamuk is the author of six novels, including Snow (Knopf, 2004) and My Name is Red (Knopf, 2001), and the memoir Istanbul: Memories and the City (Knopf, 2005). His work has been translated into more than twenty languages. He received the Nobel Prize in literature in 2006.
