Following Terror's Forgotten Trail
An explosives case raises ghosts of a bloody past
Starting in 1915, an eight-year campaign of massacres, murders, and deportations by the Ottoman Turks left dead up to 1.5 million Armenians, a calamity scholars widely agree was the 20th century's first genocide. In October, a resolution recognizing this nearly passed the House of Representatives but was withdrawn after White House pleadings that it would wreck relations with Turkey. Topalian, among others, was incensed. His grandparents had perished in Turkey, and his impassioned speeches on the genocide are legendary within the Armenian community.
Unsolved thefts. As Pete Elliott looked into Topalian's background, he learned the ATF had traced the Bedford explosives to an unsolved 1976 theft from a Michigan drilling site. The FBI had long suspected that those explosives ended up in the hands of Armenian terrorists; some of the dynamite later turned up at an Armenian youth camp in Franklin, Mass.
Elliott began reading up on Armenian terrorism. In the 1970s, a wave of terror fell upon Turkish officials, engineered by Armenian extremists furious over Turkish denials of the genocide. The attacks included 160 bombings and assassinations of 22 Turkish diplomats worldwide. The terror ebbed by the mid-1980s, but many attacks went unsolved.
Elliott soon found himself plunged into an aging Armenian underground. Once militant youths now had kids and mortgages; some broke down and cried as he interviewed them. After an investigation that spanned 25 states and Canada, the leaking bomb cache ultimately led Elliott to suspects in a string of terrorist attacks from a generation ago. He would come to believe that Mourad Topalian had led a double life, that the respected community leader had been a key figure in the world of Armenian terrorism. For many of Topalian's alleged compatriots, the statute of limitations had expired--but not for the man left holding the explosives.
By the fall of 1999, Mourad Topalian had turned 56, moved back to Cleveland, and taken a job as a vice president of Cuyahoga Community College. That October, Elliott helped arrest him in the college parking lot; Topalian was indicted for conspiracy to traffic in firearms and explosives and to commit acts of terror "against persons of Turkish descent." Prosecutors accused him of ordering the theft of the explosives, sending followers to Beirut for weapons training, and directing the 1980 car bombing of Turkey's mission to the United Nations, which badly injured three passersby. In other documents, they alleged that the stolen explosives were used in two 1981 bombings--of the Turkish consulate in Beverly Hills and the Orange County Convention Center--but officials say they have no evidence of Topalian's direct involvement in the California attacks. Investigators also believe he served as a top leader of the Justice Commandos of the Armenian Genocide, a terrorist group that took credit for those attacks and more.
Topalian has maintained his innocence of any terrorist activity, and his trial drew over 60 letters to the judge from doctors, priests, and others attesting to his character. In a plea agreement last May, the conspiracy counts were dropped, and he pleaded guilty only to explosives and weapons charges. His backers suggest that pro-Turkish elements in the U.S. government have singled him out for persecution, and the Armenian community has raised over $300,000 for his defense. Topalian insists that he believed the storage locker held only supplies for relief efforts in Beirut, and that he pleaded guilty to spare his family the ordeal of further legal proceedings. "He was used," argues his attorney, Mark Geragos.
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