The Court of Cassation upheld the death sentences given...

The Court of Cassation upheld the death sentences given to 31 Moslem activists accused of participating in an Islamist riot in 1993 in which 37 people were killed.
The Sivas massacre took place on July 2, 1993 when an angry crowd of 15,000, who had left Friday prayers in the city of Sivas, launched an eight-hour protest against a visit by a group of intellectuals who wanted to take part in an annual Alawite festival.
The crowd set ablaze the hotel in which the liberal Moslem minority intellectuals were staying. They were said to have been angered by the visit of leading Turkish intellectual Aziz Nesin, who was then translating Salman Rushdie's controversial novel, "The Satanic Verses." Security forces failed to stop the fire and the hotel was completely burned down, trapping 37 people inside.
The judicial process that started with the trial of 124 suspects still continues at the Ankara No.1 State Security Court (DGM). The Ankara state security court had handed down the death penalty to 33 defendants before, but its verdict was overruled by Turkey's appeal court, which ordered a new trial saying that many of the other sentences of up to 15 years were too light.
The DGM's first decision in this latest trial said that the accused who set fire to the hotel had no feeling of guilt while the 37 victims were burning to death. The court evaluated the incident as one of the most grave incidents in Turkish-Islamic history. The decision also stated that they had acted to subvert the secular Turkish political structure and this was the basis for the capital punishment decision.