Australia's prime minister on Thursday played down any potential link between the arrest of a suspected Islamic State group member in Turkey and a World War I battle commemoration attended by hundreds of Australians and New Zealanders at the Gallipoli peninsula.
A Syrian national was detained in Tekirdag province before the annual gathering for a dawn service at ANZAC Cove to mark the April 25, 1915, landing of Australian and New Zealand Army Corps troops in an ill-fated campaign to take the Dardanelles Straits, according to media reports.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison said the arrest took place three driving hours from the Gallipoli service and no changes to security had been made as a result.
"The reports that we are receiving are inconclusive about any link between that arrest and any possible planned event at Gallipoli itself," Morrison told reporters. "In fact, to make that assumption would be, I think, making a very big assumption."
A monument near the Australian War Memorial in Canberra to the Turks' victorious military commander at Gallipoli, Kemal Ataturk, is inscribed with his reassuring words to Australians that their war dead "are now lying in the soil of a friendly country."
Ataturk is quoted at the memorial as the first president of the Turkish Republic saying in 1934: "You, the mothers who sent their sons from faraway countries, wipe away your tears; your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well."
Disclaimer: No Business Standard Journalist was involved in creation of this content