Turkey's few Muslim converts to Christianity, of which the hijacker Tuesday of a Turkish airliner claimed to be one, are a motley, marginal group that includes people on personal spiritual quests, as well as those in search of more material benefits.
Hakan Ekinci, 28, who hijacked a Turkish Airlines Tirana-Istanbul flight to Italy on Tuesday, presented himself in an internet blog adressed to Pope Benedict XVI as one such convert who did not want to serve in "a Muslim army."
Whether he actually belongs to any of Turkey's Christian churches, however, has come under doubt with the appearance of several articles in the Turkish press Wednesday saying he has a criminal record for fraud, in addition to two spells in the stockade for desertion.
Most of Turkey's "new Christians" -- who only number about 1,000 in a population of 73 million that is more than 99 percent Muslim -- belong to a score of evangelical parishes scattered across Turkey.
"We have about a thousand followers in our churches, mostly Turks, but also a few foreigners and, when there is only one church in town, some Armenian Orthodox and Catholics as well," explained Sait Cakir of the Ankara Evangelical Community.
The evangelical churches, which are not recognised by the strictly secular laws of Turkey, are mainly in the three biggest cities -- Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir.
"The fact that we are open to everyone means that we get some strange followers," said Ihsan Ozbek, the evangelical pastor for Ankara. "Some come looking for women, others for money, yet others for visas to the west."
Bulent, who works for an international organisation in the Turkish capital and will not reveal his last name, said his conversion was the result of an arduous quest for his roots.
"My father always said we were descendents of Turkmens from Central Asia," he said. "But one day, I learned that we were in fact a family of Jews who had converted to Islam."
After mulling this over for a while, he finally opted in 1993 to join the Syriac church, in memory of the many tales his grandmother used to tell him of the Christians of southeast Anatolia, where her family originated from.
Ferda, who also did not want to give her family name, said she too felt uncomfortable with her identity as a Turk.
She was raised in a community of Muslim Greeks who were deported to Turkey during the population exchanges of 1923.
"But when I went to high school," she said, "I suddenly realised what a stranger I was to Turkish culture" -- so she converted to Catholicism.
But conversions to the Roman church, as to the other mainstream churches in Turkey -- mostly Armenian and Greek orthodox -- remain the exception.
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