Turkish actor’s Cyprus shame
A popular Turkish actor, who this week admitted to killing 10 Greek Cypriots during Turkey’s invasion of Cyprus in 1974, is expected to be called before the island’s missing persons committee despite issuing a statement late yesterday retracting his comments. The revelations of Attila Olgac, star of a hit television series, to a private Turkish channel caused widespread shock. Olgac said his first casualty had been a 19-year-old Greek-Cypriot prisoner of war. «When I held out the gun he spat in my face. Then I shot him in the forehead,» Olgac said. The actor said he then killed another nine people but did not specify whether they were POWs. He said he originally objected to killing – as an «artist» – but that his commanding officer said, «This is where art ends and real life begins.» He added that the killings still haunt him. Last night the actor retracted his comments, saying that they had been taken from a script he had written about the brutality of the Cyprus conflict.
