Assassination of Mehmet Baydar and Bahadır Demir

On January 27, 1973, two Turkish diplomats — Consul General Mehmet Baydar and Vice Consul Bahadır Demir — were shot and killed at the Biltmore Hotel complex in Santa Barbara, California. The perpetrator, Armenian-American Gourgen Yanikian, then 77 years old, had lured the two men to a tile-roofed cottage he had rented at the hotel under the alias of an Iranian man named "Yaniki." He told the diplomats he intended to give Turkey a gift of a banknote and a painting that had reportedly been stolen from the Ottoman palace more than a century earlier.

At lunch, Yanikian revealed that he was not Iranian but Armenian and a survivor of the Armenian genocide. Baydar reacted angrily, dropping the banknote and directing an insult at Yanikian before Yanikian drew a Luger pistol concealed in a hollowed-out book and shot the two diplomats. As they lay wounded, Yanikian retrieved a second pistol and shot them again, killing them.

Journalist Michael Bobelian wrote that the fact neither victim had been alive during the Armenian genocide mattered little to Yanikian, who reportedly viewed the two men "not as human beings, but as symbols of decades of injustice."

Mehmet Baydar was born in Istanbul in 1924, educated at Robert College and Istanbul University's law school, and later at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris. He joined Turkey's Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1950 and held postings including chief secretary at the Turkish embassy in Washington, D.C., before becoming chief consul in Los Angeles in 1972. A year before his death, during a protest at the Turkish consulate on the anniversary of the Armenian genocide, Baydar reportedly ripped in half a list of demands presented to him by activists. He was survived by his wife, Güner, whom he had married 20 months earlier and who was pregnant at the time of his death.

Bahadır Demir was born on March 9, 1942, in Istanbul, and was educated at Robert College and the Faculty of Political Science of Ankara University, graduating in 1967 before entering the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Los Angeles, as vice consul, was his first foreign posting.

Yanikian was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison in July 1973. He was paroled for health reasons approximately one month before his death in 1984. The attack was the first in a series of Armenian militant attacks against Turkish diplomats worldwide. A primary school in Istanbul and a street in Ankara are named after Demir, while a high school in Istanbul and a street in Ankara are named after Baydar.