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U.S. Air Force Officer Shot, Wounded in Turkey

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SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

Two gunmen shot and wounded a U.S. Air Force officer outside his apartment in western Turkey on Thursday--the second shooting of an American this month and a sobering setback to Turkey’s success in presenting itself as a stable, safe haven in the post-Gulf War Middle East.

Lt. Col. Alvin Macke, 44, assigned to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s Land Headquarters Southeast in the Aegean port city of Izmir, was struck in the face by one bullet. He was saved from further injury when he promptly fought back, according to an account he gave to a fellow officer.

“Two men he did not know rode up with him in the elevator,” said the officer, who declined to be identified. Macke “was opening the door to his apartment when he was shot. It was very much of a surprise, but he threw his briefcase at them and the second shot missed.

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“He then chased them down five flights of stairs, but they got away,” he said, adding that Macke is not in a “life-threatening condition” and will be sent for treatment in Germany shortly.

Responsibility for his shooting was claimed by Dev-Sol, a banned radical Marxist group hardened in the political violence and repression of the 1970s in Turkey.

Dev-Sol, which is showing renewed strength, has claimed responsibility for most of more than 15 attacks on allied interests in Turkey since the start of Gulf operations, including the fatal shooting on Feb. 7 of Bobbie Mozelle, an American civilian worker at the U.S. Incirlik Air Base, used for bombing Iraq. “We will chase the imperialists until they take their hands off the Middle East,” a Dev-Sol caller told Turkish newspapers then.

Diplomats fear a backlash of further violence as Dev-Sol tries to gain support from anti-war sentiment in Turkey. But this may be tempered by Turkish relief at the end of the Gulf fighting and admiration for allied success, some analysts say.

Terrorist attacks--pinpricks on the outer calm surface of Turkey, a Muslim nation of 57 million--are part of an undercurrent of political violence that continues to claim a steady stream of victims.

At least two people were killed in southeast Turkey on Thursday. That is an area populated by an ethnic Kurdish minority, where separatist Kurdish guerrillas have been fighting security forces for 6 1/2 years in a struggle in which more than 2,000 people have died.

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In Sirnak, a provincial capital of 30,000 just north of the Iraqi border, a soldier and a 17-year-old youth died in one of the most serious Kurdish riots since the uprising of March, 1990. Local reporters said the riot started in a dispute over coal-mining rights and escalated when soldiers were reported to have shot the coal miners’ mules.

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