Turkey remembered on Thursday its assassinated diplomats Reşat Moralı and Tecelli Ari on the 40th anniversary of their killings.
"We remember with respect our martyrs Reşat Moralı, Labour Attache, and Tecelli Ari, Religious Affairs Attache at our Embassy in Paris, assassinated in a heinous attack by the terrorist organization ASALA on 4 March 1981," the Turkish Foreign Ministry said on Twitter.
Since the 1970s, Armenian terror groups have killed 31 Turkish diplomats and their family members, according to data compiled by Anadolu Agency (AA).
Founded in 1975 in Beirut, Lebanon, during the Lebanese Civil War, ASALA is responsible for hundreds of bloody terrorist acts. According to "Armenian Terror," a 2006 study by Ömer Engin Lütem, a former Turkish diplomat, the killings spanned continents, taking place in the U.S., Austria, France, Italy, Spain, Lebanon, Greece, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Canada, Portugal, Iran and the U.K.
While the Marxist-Leninist ASALA not only targeted Turkey but also other countries and became infamous for a 1975 bombing on the Beirut office of the World Council of Churches, the nationalistic JCAG only targeted Turkey because it believed that attacking other countries would damage the so-called "Armenian struggle."
Armenian terrorist attacks intensified from 1980 to 1983, when 580 of the 699 attacks – over 80% – occurred.
