Ankara - Turkish police on Tuesday took into custody two former generals, the head of the Ankara Chamber of Commerce and more than a dozen other suspected members of a shadowy group of right-wing nationalists who are accused of plotting to bring down the government, Turkish media reported.

In dawn raids in Ankara, retired generals Hursit Tolon and Sener Eruygur were taken into custody, as was Sinan Aygun, head of the Ankara Chamber of Commerce, and Mustafa Balbay, the Ankara bureau chief of the Cumhuriyet newspaper.

Anti-terrorism police searched the houses of the four and also conducted searches of Cumhuriyet newspaper offices in Ankara and the Istanbul and Ankara offices of a pro-secularist non-governmental organization headed by Eruygur.

Melbourne, June 30 : German police arrested a Turkish criminal after finding him in a newspaper snap cheering on his side during a Euro 2008 football match, which he was watching in a bar in Munich.

The 36-year-old man was wanted for fraud.

The officers immediately recognised him when they saw the picture, and contacted the newspaper to find out where the snap was clicked.

The barmen told the police that that man had been watching games there since the tournament began, and that people knew him as a local supermarket worker.

The man was nabbed while at work.

Berlin - A German institute of Turkish studies sacked its Turkish-born director Thursday after he said Turks in Germany and other European countries suffered discrimination similar to that suffered by the Jews in the Holocaust.

The Essen-based Centre for Turkish Studies, which is funded by the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, said it had decided to sack Faruk Sen for the comment and for previous remarks that presented a distorted picture of relations between Turks and Germans in Germany.

Sen had contributed to polarization, rather than integration, the institute's central aim, it said.

Mogadishu - Pirates have released the Turkey-flagged cargo ship MV Arean which was seized off the lawless Somali coast at the end of May but a German ship seized at the same time is still being hel

Istanbul  - Celebrations to mark the 2,000th anniversary of the birth of St Paul began Saturday in Tarsus, Turkey, the birthplace of the evangelist and author of much of the Christian New Testament.

A prayer was given in the historic Church of St Paul to start the Year of St Paul declared by Pope Benedict XVI, which officially begins June 29 and is expected to bring Christian pilgrims to Turkey throughout the year.

The 12th century church was confiscated by the government in 1943 and was used for decades as an army storehouse before being made into a museum. Christians are allowed to worship there, but must not leave anything in the building.