TDN with wire dispatches
ANKARA - Turkish police said on Monday they had foiled a bomb plot targeting a NATO summit in Istanbul at the end of June which is to be attended by U.S. President George W. Bush and other Western leaders.
Undeterred by the bomb plot, the alliance said it was not reconsidering its plan to hold the summit in Istanbul at the end of June despite the foiled plot. "At the moment there is no consideration of that," a NATO spokeswoman said in Brussels, when asked if the June 28-29 meeting of leaders from NATO's 26 nations, including President Bush, might be cancelled.
"The Turkish authorities are responsible for security and we have confidence in them."
In simultaneous operations in Istanbul and Bursa, police arrested a total of 25 people they said belonged to a militant Islamist group called Ansar al-Islam, 16 of them were detained in Bursa, 250 kilometers south of Istanbul. Nine other suspected members of the group with explosives training were detained in a simultaneous raid in Istanbul, the semiofficial Anatolia news agency reported. The nine were taken on Monday to a court in Istanbul, the agency said.
The 16 suspects were expected to appear before a court in Bursa on Monday.
Police said they had also seized guns, explosives, bomb-making booklets and 4,000 compact discs featuring training instructions from al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.
Turkish security has been stepped up since four devastating suicide truck bomb attacks in Istanbul last November that killed 61 people. Al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for the attacks which targeted British and Jewish sites.
Ansar al-Islam is a militant group from Kurdish northern Iraq accused by Washington of being an ally of al-Qaeda and a force behind attacks on U.S. troops occupying Iraq.
"After a successful operation the organisation planning this attack has been destroyed. This is the result of a year-long operation," Bursa governor Oguz Kagan Koksal told reporters. Koksal said Ansar al-Islam had planned to carry out more attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq after the June 28-29 NATO summit. NTV television said some of those held had already taken part in the insurgency in Iraq.
Koksal said the group's leader, identified only as Alpaslan T., was among the suspects detained in Bursa. "The group, which was in the middle of an attack plan, has been rendered ineffective," he said.
Turkey has heightened security ahead of the meeting, launching security sweeps throughout the country. The NATO summit will be the first since Romania, Bulgaria, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Slovenia and Slovakia joined the alliance in April to take its membership to 26.
The men arrested had also been plotting an attack on a synagogue in Bursa as well as a bank robbery in the same town to raise funds for their operations, Koksal said.
The men had been found to hold fake identity cards. They had also been involved in the manufacture of fake software including PC games to raise money, Koksal said.
Turkish television showed pictures of timing devices, guns and explosive materials seized by police in Bursa.
Since the November truck bombings, Istanbul has witnessed several other much smaller attacks, the most serious of which targeted a Masonic lodge and killed a waiter and one of two suicide bombers.
Turkey, the only predominantly Muslim member of NATO, is viewed as a prime target for militant Islamist groups because of its secular democracy and its close security ties with the United States and Israel.
Last autumn, Turkey agreed to send peacekeeping troops to Iraq to help its U.S. ally, but later withdrew the offer after meeting strong resistance from members of Iraq's U.S.-appointed Governing Council.
According to Turkish newspapers, more than 30,000 police and other security forces, including hundreds of snipers, are expected to be on duty at the summit. Police are also reportedly keeping a close eye on anti-war, anti-globalization, and various leftist groups ahead of the summit, fearing they could stage protests or attacks.

Copyright 2004, Turkish Daily News. This article is redistributed with permission for personal use of TurkishPress.com readers. No part of this article may be reproduced, further distributed or archived without the prior permission of the publisher.