World Notes Canada

Claude Brunelle, 31, a security guard at the Turkish embassy in Ottawa, usually works in a bulletproof booth. But when three men parked their U-Haul truck on the grass beside the embassy entrance early one morning last week, he emerged from his booth, challenged the men, then suddenly pulled his .38-cal. revolver and fired. The interlopers cut him down with a fusillade, killing him, then blew open the embassy's front doors with explosives.

During a four-hour siege of the embassy, the three, who said they were members of the Armenian Revolutionary Army, took eleven hostages, including the Turkish Ambassador's wife and teenage daughter. To escape capture, Turkish Ambassador Coskun Kirca leaped from a second-story window, breaking an arm and a leg and cracking his pelvis. He lay briefly in the line of fire until a police officer could drag him to safety. Finally, police persuaded the three men to surrender. The attack was an attempt to force Turkey to acknowledge responsibility for the 1915 massacre of an estimated 1 million of its Armenian minority. Said an Armenian community leader in Toronto: "The 1915 genocide has been ignored by the whole world. The Armenian cause is a forgotten cause."