Editor hated by Turkish right gunned down
Gareth Jenkins, Istanbul

The Sunday Times
January 21, 2007

THE daughter of a murdered Turkish-Armenian editor cried out to his
fleeing killer from the balcony of the Agos newspaper offices in
Istanbul where they both worked.

As the body of Hrant Dink lay below, Sera Dink shouted: `They have
killed my father. Is his blood any cleaner now?’ Dink’s colleagues
said he had received a phone call shortly before 3pm on Friday and
left the office at once.

Witnesses said that as Dink, who had received numerous threats,
emerged he was shot three times in the nape of the neck by a young
man. His murderer fled, shouting, `I have killed an Armenian’, and
levelled his pistol at passers-by who tried to stop him. Video footage
from a shop next to the offices showed the assailant in the moments
before the attack, his gun in his right hand.

Last night police said they had captured the suspected gunman,
identified as Ogun Samast, after being tipped off by his
father. Samast, said to be 16 or 17, was arrested on a bus in the
Black Sea city of Samsun.

In recent years Dink, 52, had become a figure of hate for Turkey’s
ultra-nationalist right, particularly over the fate of the Armenians
in the first world war, when between 1m and 1.5m were driven from
their homes. Many were killed straight away with others abandoned in
the Syrian desert. Some estimates put the total at 600,000, although
it was almost certainly higher.

Most foreign historians recognise the deportations and massacres as
the first genocide of the 20th century. This has always been denied by
Turkey, which says it was simply a tragedy of war.

In 2005 an Istanbul court sentenced Dink to a suspended six-month jail
term for `insulting Turkishness’. The conviction was upheld last year
and at the time of his death Dink was facing charges of trying to
influence the judiciary by comments he made in an article about his
trial.

`If a defendant cannot influence the judiciary, then who can?’ he
wrote in Agos.

The cases brought Dink to the attention of the right. He was well
aware of the risks. `He had been receiving death threats for the past
2½ years,’ said Erdal Dogan, his lawyer.

On Friday, in his last article, Dink reported that the threats had
recently intensified. He said he had passed them on to the local
police but they had done nothing. `I want to make a note of that
here,’ he wrote. `Just in case.’

Dink’s assassination could not have come at a worse time for Turkey’s
bid to join the European Union. With opposition on the rise inside
member states such as France and Germany, few Turks expect their
country ever be to granted membership. Friday’s killing has deepened
the gloom.