Teenager ‘confessed to murder of editor’

By Amberin Zaman in Istanbul

The Daily Telegraph/UK
12:35am GMT 22/01/2007

A teenager arrested in connection with the murder of an ethnic
Armenian newspaper editor has confessed to the killing, Istanbul’s
chief prosecutor, Aykut Cengiz Engin, said yesterday.

The suspect, Ogun Samast, 17, was captured by police in the Black Sea
port city of Samsun on Saturday and flown to Istanbul for questioning
together with six other suspects, police said. They said the youth was
caught after a tip-off from his father, who saw his picture being
broadcast as the prime suspect in the murder of Hrant Dink.

Mr Dink was shot dead on Friday as he walked out of the office of
Agos, the bilingual Armenian newspaper that he founded and edited. The
murder has prompted fresh scrutiny of the pressures facing Turkey’s
ethnic and religious minorities.

The European Union, which Turkey is striving to join, has long cited
discrimination against Christians and Kurds together with curbs on
free speech, as the biggest obstacles to its membership.

Mr Dink was among the few members of Turkey’s small Armenian community
to openly label the mass slaughter of some one million Armenians by
the Ottoman Turks during and after the First World War as "genocide."
His stance provoked fury among Turkish ultra-nationalists, who sent
him hate mail and death threats.

Tributes to the Turkish-Armenian author Hrant Dink It also led to his
conviction last year on charges of "insulting Turkishness".

Samast is said to have expressed no remorse during his interrogation.

"Dink said Turkish blood was dirty and so I decided to kill him,"
Samast was quoted as saying by the news channel CNN-Turk.

Police are also investigating possible links between Mr Dink’s murder
and that of an Italian priest in Trabzon last year.