Senior Turkey official says Israel behind WikiLeaks release

Published 02.12.10
Deputy leader of Turkish PM Erdogan's AKP party hints that Israel engineered the release of U.S. diplomatic cables as a plot to pressure Turkey, the daily Hurriyet reports.
By Haaretz Service
A senior Turkish official blamed Israel for the WikiLeaks release, Turkish daily Hurriyet reported on Wednesday.
Addressing reporters, Huseyin Celik, deputy leader of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's AKP party, hinted that Israel engineered the leak of hundreds of thousands of United States diplomatic cables as a plot to pressure the Turkish government.
“One has to look at which countries are pleased with these," Celik was quoted as saying. "Israel is very pleased. Israel has been making statements for days, even before the release of these documents.”
“Documents were released and they immediately said, ‘Israel will not suffer from this.’ How did they know that?” Celik asked.
Turkish officials suspect that "the main cause of these leaks was to weaken the Turkish government”, Hurriyet reported.
On Tuesday, Turkish President Abdullah Gul said that the leak appeared to be "a result of a systematic work with some purpose behind it" but Gul did not mention Israel.
According to Hurriyet report, around 8,000 documents from the U.S. Embassy in Ankara have been released by WikiLeaks.
Israeli-Turkish relations have cooled in recent years and reached a low point last May when nine Turkish citizens were killed as Israeli naval commandos boarded a Gaza-bound aid flotilla.

Al Bez.