ISTANBUL - Turkish PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Saturday that attacks on several priests and a publishing house in Turkey are incidents they can never accept.
"The Santoro incident in Trabzon, the incident in Malatya (publishing house incident), and the recent incident in Izmir (an attack injuring a priest). We can never accept them," he told in a gathering in Istanbul to exchange Eid al-Adha greetings.
"Those who are staging them do not know anything about Islam," he said.
Erdogan said his government is at equal distance to Muslims, Christians and Jews in Turkey.
"It is true that 99 percent of our country consists of Muslims, but there are also people of different religions."
Erdogan said the government has to guarantee their life security and said those attacks are not things that a Muslim can do because Islam is the religion of peace and tolerance.
"We will do what we have to do (to end these incidents) till the very end," he told.
Erdogan said his government is against ethnic, regional and religious nationalism because one can be proud of his/her ethnic identity, but cannot keep it over the other`s identity.
"Some say there are 38 ethnic identities in Turkey, some think there are 30 different ethnic identities," he told.
Erdogan said whatever the number of ethnic identities, what is important is the Turkish citizenship that unites everybody.
"As the administrators of the Republic of Turkey, we are at an equal distance to 70 million people in our country," he also said.