Ankara, Turkey - Turkey's Islamist-rooted government faced a wave of anger and calls for resignation after a deadly fundamentalist attack on the country's highest administrative court stunned a nation fiercely proud of its secular system.
The anti-government backlash Friday coincided with ceremonies marking the 87th anniversary of the start of the War of Independence, which ushered in a secular republic on the ruins of the theocratic Ottoman Empire.
On Thursday, tens of thousands of Ankara residents took to the streets in protest against the attack on the Council of State by an Islamist lawyer whose shooting spree killed one judge and wounded four others.
Alparslan Arslan, 29, shouting "I am a soldier of Allah", sprayed the judges' meeting with handgun fire, saying later that he wanted to "punish" the court for upholding a ban on the Islamic headscarf.
The attack underscored a deepening rift between the secularist establishment and the government, often accused of trying to reinforce the role of religion in politics and daily life.
Arslan initially told anti-terror police that he acted alone, but later confessed to being part of a team that organized three recent grenade attacks against the pro-secular left-wing opposition newspaper Cumhuriyet, media reports said.
Ten people believed to have links with the gunman were reported arrested.
In a symbolic gesture of protest, more than 25,000 people gathered Thursday at the mausoleum of the Republic's founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. On Friday morning, they numbered more than 50,000.
Speaking to reporters, the Chief of General Staff, General Hilmi Ozkok, denounced what he called "a fundamentalist attack" against the Council of State.
The top man in the powerful Turkish army, which sees itself as the guarantor of republican values, praised public response to the killing and said it should "continue."
"Mollahs, go to Iran", demonstrators chanted as they filled the streets of Ankara Thursday during the funeral of slain judge Mustafa Yucel Ozbilgin, 64, and other ceremonies.
Much of the anger was directed at the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose Justice and Development Party (AKP) has roots in a banned Islamist movement which it claims to have since renounced. Today the party describes itself simply as "conservative."
Erdogan sparked sharp public and media criticism for failing to show up at the judge's funeral.
Government ministers who did attend were jostled, insulted and even spat upon by furious crowds. Justice Minister Cemil Cicek was seen fleeing the mosque where funeral prayers were held under a cordon of bodyguards.
The crowd called Erdogan a "murderer" -- something unheard of in recent Turkish politics -- blaming the attack on his party's campaign to lift the ban on women wearing headscarves in public institutions and universities.
In an interview Friday with the Star newspaper, Erdogan said he was the victim of "a great conspiracy," and blamed -- without elaborating -- opposition leader Deniz Baykal, chairman of the social-democratic Republican People's Party.
Most newspaper columnists Friday scoffed at his statement, and many called for the government to step down.
"Turkey must rid itself of this government," which "encouraged" the attack on the Council of State, wrote a columnist in the mass-selling daily Hurriyet.
"The AKP, by turning a deaf ear to all warnings since its arrival to power and with the policies it has put in place, has encouraged the forces of darkness to commit this sort of act," he wrote.
A columnist for Vatan, another mass daily, called for early elections, an eventuality that has circulated within political circles in Ankara for the past few months.
"Those who come by the vote must go by the vote," he wrote.
Parliamentary elections, if held on schedule, would take place in November 2007.