Andrea Santoro

Andrea Santoro (7 September 1945, in Priverno, Italy – 5 February 2006, in Trabzon, Turkey) was a Roman Catholic priest in Turkey, murdered in the Santa Maria Church in Trabzon where he served as a member of the Catholic Church's Fidei donum missionary program.

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• Andrea santoro pope francis reflects on the late priest who was killed in turkey
• Don andrea santoro
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On 5 February 2006 he was shot dead from behind while kneeling in prayer in the church. A witness heard the perpetrator shouting "Allahu Akbar". Oğuzhan Akdin, a 16-year-old high school student, was arrested two days after the shooting, carrying a 9mm pistol. An investigation by the U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations on stolen weaponry revealed that this gun had been part of a batch of guns that the US had given to the Iraqi army but which had gone missing.

The student told police he had been influenced by the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy. The murder was preceded by massive anti-Christian propaganda in the Turkish popular press. In the three months before his murder, Father Santoro's telephone had been tapped by the Turkish police in Trabzon.

On 10 October 2006, the accused Oğuzhan Akdin was sentenced to 18 years, 10 months, and 20 days in prison for "premeditated murder" by a juvenile court in Trabzon. According to the apostolic vicar to Anatolia, Msgr. Luigi Padovese, neither the killer nor his mother showed any remorse during the trial. She even compared her son to Mehmet Ali Ağca, who tried to assassinate Pope John Paul II in 1981, and said that his deed "was committed in the name of Allah and was a gift to the state and the nation".

As the murderer of Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink also came from Trabzon and was also under 18 years of age, Turkish police are investigating possible connections between the slayings of Santoro and Dink. In October 2007, Turkey's Court of Appeals affirmed the jail sentence for the teenage killer of Father Santoro. In the aftermath of the 2016 Turkish coup d'état attempt, the killer was prematurely released from jail after serving less than 10 years of his sentence.

Pope Benedict XVI recalled his martyrdom during his homily at the Shrine of Meryem Ana Evi (House of the Virgin Mary) in Ephesus on 29 November 2006.

At Don Santoro's funeral at the Basilica of St. John Lateran, Cardinal Camillo Ruini, the vicar of the Diocese of Rome, mentioned in his homily that the possible beatification process for Don Santoro may be opened after February 2011. His assassination is marked annually by the Don Andrea Santoro Association, which is organized in part by Archbishop Angelo De Donatis, the Vicar General of Rome and a seminary classmate of Santoro.