Turkish police officers detain a suspect following an attack at a publishing house in the south-eastern Turkish city of Malatya, yesterday. Attackers slit the throats of three people, including a German, at a Turkish Bible publisher's yesterday, officials said, the latest attack on minorities in mainly Muslim Turkey. - Reuters

ISTANBUL, Turkey (AP):

Assailants killed three people yesterday at a publishing house that distributed Bibles, in the latest attack apparently targeting Turkey's small Christian minority.

The three victims were found with their throats slit and their hands and legs bound at the Zirve publishing house in Malatya, a city in eastern central Turkey, local Gov. Ibrahim Dasoz said. One was found still alive, and was taken to the hospital but later died, he said.

Two of the victims were Turkish, and one was a German who had lived in Malatya since 2003, Dasoz said. The German ambassador to Turkey said he was shocked by the attack.

"Even if the exact circumstances of the crime are not yet known, I most strongly condemn this brutal crime," Ambassador Eckart Cuntz said in a statement. The government-run Anatolia news agency identified the German as 46-year-old Tilman Ekkehart Geske.

Hospitalised

A man who jumped from a window to escape was hospitalised with injuries and underwent surgery.

Police detained four suspects, and believe the man who jumped from the window was one of the attackers and leapt out to avoid arrest, according to the Malatya governor, Dasoz. Anatolia said all five suspects - aged 19 and 20 - were preparing for the university entrance exam and were friends from the same students' residence. They were all carrying a letter that read: "We five are brothers. We are going to our deaths. We may not return," according to Anatolia.

Malatya is known as a hotbed of nationalists, and is also the hometown of Mehmet Ali Agca, who shot Pope John Paul II in 1981.

The Zirve publishing house has been the site of previous protests by nationalists accusing it of proselytising in this 99 per cent Muslim but secular country, Dogan news agency reported.