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The Turkish Consul Assasssination

It was a murder that Sydneysiders will never forget. International terrorism had arrived on our doorstep. But not at Sydney Airport or Government House, as we might have expected. It was in the quiet street of one of Sydney’s more affluent suburbs on a summer’s morning – 17 December 1980 – that gunfire burst out and the bodies of two men, who minutes earlier had been going about their daily routine, lay dead in their cars, riddled with bullets and covered in blood.

In a heartbeat the assassins were gone. The crime looked like a professional hit, and the killers were believed to be on a plane out of Australia before their victims’ bodies had arrived at the Sydney morgue.

The fatal day began as normal for the Sydney-based Australian Turkish consul-general, 50-year-old Sarik Ariyak. At 9.45 am Mr Ariyak left by the front door of his home in Portland Street, Dover Heights, in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, to be escorted to his consulate, in nearby Woollahra. His decoy driver, 28-year-old Engin Sever – who also acted as a bodyguard – had sounded the horn to let his boss know that he had arrived.

As they did every day, Mr Ariyak got into his inconspicuous 1970 Holden which was parked in the driveway of his home and Severs moved the grey 323 Mazda with the diplomatic plates, which was parked across the driveway, to let him out. The consul-general would then follow the escort vehicle to the consulate, about a 15-minute drive away. To investigating officers, it was the regularity of this daily routine that brought about their deaths.

As Mr Ariyak manoeuvred his car into position to follow his escort, the killers struck. A high-powered BMW motorbike carrying a pillion passenger screamed up Portland Street and came to a screeching halt at the escort vehicle. Both men on the motorbike were clad in leather biker’s outfits, including leather jackets, and their faces were covered by full-face helmets.

The pillion passenger produced a semi-automatic pistol from inside his jacket and opened fire at the escort. Before he could get his gun out of its holster, Severs was struck with a volley of gunfire that shattered all his vehicle’s windows and hit him in the head and chest. He slumped over the steering wheel – because the car was still in motion, it careered 100 metres down Portland Street before it slammed through a brick fence.

The killers then turned their attention to their primary target, the unarmed and probably terrified Turkish consul-general. The pillion passenger who had so expertly just done away with the bodyguard now shot Mr Ariyak at point-blank range through the driver’s window. Mr Ariyak was struck several times in the head and body.

Their job done, the assassins sped off down Portland Street, out into Military Road and the main stream of traffic … and disappeared. The two murders had taken less than one minute.

With gunsmoke still hanging in the air, Mr Ariyak’s wife, Damet, who only two minutes earlier had kissed him goodbye on the doorstep – and had then witnessed him being murdered – rushed to her husband’s side. But it was too late even for a final goodbye. He was dead. Severs would die an hour later in hospital.

The gun used in the murders was believed to be a .38 calibre semi-automatic pistol capable of firing up to 14 shots. The killer’s black 500cc motorbike was found dumped in nearby Rose Bay seven hours later. Before that, the motorcycle had been involved in an unexplained minor hit and run accident in Chatswood, about 10 kilometres away on Sydney’s north shore.

The only flimsy hope of catching the killers came when police were told by local witnesses that they had seen two men acting suspiciously in a nearby bus shelter the night before the assassinations and that the men could have been the two gunmen. It may have been there that they plotted their tactics for the following day. That would be about as close as the police ever got to identifying the assassins. But police didn’t have to wait long to find out who was behind the murders. Later that day they received a phone call from someone who spoke with a thick foreign accent. The caller said, ‘Listen, and listen well. We are the justice commandos of Armenian genocide. We have just shot the Turkish consul-general.’

Police were left without a clue to the killers’ identities.

At the 1983 inquest into the murders, the coroner heard that police had interviewed numerous suspects, without any positive results. Although the NSW government has offered a $250,000 reward for any information leading to the arrest of the killers, nothing has come of it, and the murders remain unsolved to this day.

 

Author’s note: The killing of Australia’s consul-general for Turkey was just one of more than 50 murders of Turkish diplomats over the years (including many consul-generals) around the world by Armenian terrorists.

 

The killings are in retaliation for what has become known as the Armenian genocide: in 1915–16, the Turkish killed 1.5 million Armenians out of a total of 2.5 Armenians in the Ottoman Empire.

Armenians all over the world commemorate this great tragedy on 24 April. It was on that day in 1915 that 300 Armenian leaders, writers, thinkers and professionals in Constantinople (present-day Istanbul) were rounded up, deported and killed. Also on that day, and also in Constantinople, 5000 of the poorest Armenians were butchered in the streets and in their homes.