Agence France Presse — English
January 20, 2007 Saturday 11:26 PM GMT

Turkey detains teenager in journalist’s murder

by Nicolas Cheviron

Turkish police detained a 17-year-old male Saturday suspected of
murdering journalist Hrant Dink, one of Turkey’s most prominent
ethnic Armenians, whose slaying sent shock waves through the country.

Ogun Samast was captured at 11:00 pm (2100 GMT) on a bus in the Black
Sea port city of Samsun, Istanbul Governor Muammer Guler told
reporters.

He was en route to his nearby home town of Trabzon, a nationalist
stronghold, still carrying the gun he allegedly used to shoot Dink,
53, three times in the head and the neck outside the office of his
Agos weekly in downtown Istanbul on Friday afternoon, Guler said.

Six other people suspected of being involved in the assassination
were detained in Trabzon.

The NTV news channel quoted Samsun prosecutor Ahmet Gokcinar as
saying that Samast confessed to gunning down Dink in his first
interrogation.

Samast, a jobless secondary school graduate, was reportedly involved
in extreme nationalist groups.

Dink was one of the taboo-breaking critics of the official line on
the mass massacres of Armenians under the Ottoman Empire, which he
labeled as genocide, and was last year given a suspended six-month
jail sentence for insulting "Turkishness."

Nationalists had branded him a "traitor" and Dink wrote in his recent
articles that he received threats and hate mail.

The hunt for the suspect, caught on the security camera of a bank
near the site of the attack, gained speed after his father called
police to identify the young man in the images.

The images released by the police showed a lean, young man clad in a
denim jacket and jeans and wearing a white beret. He was seen holding
an object, which officials said was a gun, under his jacket.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan hailed Samast’s detention "in the
name of democracy and the struggle for freedom".

All seven detainees were to be flown to Istanbul, where three other
people were taken into custody Friday but later released.

"All their links are being investigated," Guler said. "The
investigation will show whether any (illegal) organisation is
involved."

Samast allegedly came to the Agos office about three hours before the
attack, presented himself as a student and asked to see Dink, Guler
quoted Agos secretaries as telling the police.

He was turned down and when one of the secretaries went out about two
hours later she saw him still standing in the street outside.

Anger boiled over Dink’s murder across Turkey, with the government
under fire for failing to protect a man who had received threats and
hate mail.

In a January 12 column in Agos, Dink also mentioned he was summoned
by one of Istanbul’s deputy governors in 2004 and warned that he
might become the target of nationalist violence if he did not tone
down his writings.

Despite the controversies, the soft-spoken and often emotional Dink
had won many hearts here as a sincere activist for Turkish-Armenian
reconciliation, who also denounced Armenian radicalism and most
recently a French bill to jail those who deny that the 1915-17
massacres constituted genocide.

The press condemned the murder as a "national disgrace" and called
for the journalist’s funeral, scheduled for Tuesday, to become a mass
event in the name of democracy and peace in Turkey.

Dink was convicted under the infamous Article 301 of the penal code,
which has been used against other intellectuals including 2006 Nobel
literature laureate Orhan Pamuk, and which the EU has denounced as a
threat to free speech in the EU-hopeful country.

The EU’s German presidency said Saturday it was "appalled" by the
"abominable killing" and neighboring Greece said the murder was aimed
at undermining Turkey’s EU ambitions.

Armenians at home and elsewhere in Europe expressed their dismay on
Saturday, with scores attending rallies in Armenia and France.

In Istanbul, hundreds of mourners paid their respects at the spot
where the journalist was gunned down, lighting candles and laying
flowers at his portrait. Some groups shouted slogans condemning the
murder.

Thousands also marched in Istanbul late Friday, holding Dink’s
pictures and shouting "We are all Armenians, we are all Hrants."

The police will also look into any possible links between Dink’s
assassination and the murder of an Italian Catholic priest in Trabzon
in February, Erdogan was quoted as saying.