Deutsche Presse-Agentur, Germany
January 20, 2007 Saturday
Further arrests in murder of Turkish-Armenian journalist
DPA x Turkey Crime Further arrests in murder of Turkish-Armenian
journalist Ankara
Five further arrests have been made in connection
with the murder in Istanbul of prominent Turkish-Armenian journalist
Hrant Dink, bringing the total number of suspects in police custody
to eight, Turkish media reported Saturday.
The editor of the Armenian and Turkish language Agos newspaper was
killed as he left the offices of the newspaper Friday afternoon.
Dink, 52, had angered nationalists in Turkey and was last year
found guilty under Turkey’s notorious Article 301 for having
"insulting Turkishness" for comments he had made in his newspaper on
Turkish-Armenian relations.
Istanbul’s provincial governor Muammer Guler said he was confident
that the perpetrators would be brought to justice soon. Turkish media
had following the murder broadcast security camera footage which
showed the killers fleeing the scene.
Thousands of people took to the streets in Istanbul Friday
evening, protesting the murder under the slogan "We are all Hrant
Dink."
In his last article written for Argos newspaper Dink said he had
received many death threats from Turkish nationalists over his
comments on Turkish-Armenian relations and was living under a kind of
psychological torture.
Around 70,000 ethnic-Armenians live in Turkey, most in Istanbul.
Armenian numbers were considerably higher, especially in eastern
Anatolia until World War I when the local Armenian population sided
with invading Russian forces.
The Ottoman government ordered the deportation of Armenians living
in the east during which hundreds of thousands of people died.
Armenian historians claim that as many as 1.5 million Christian
Armenians were killed in the deportations and in massacres and that
the actions were a clear genocide.
Turkey admits that there were massacres of Armenians during the
deportations, but vehemently denies that the killings constituted a
genocide.