People’s Daily Online, China
Jan 26 2007

Trabzon governor, police chief removed from office due to
journalist’s killing

Governor Huseyin Yavuzdemir and police chief Resat Altay of the
Trabzon province in northern Turkey were removed from office due to
recent incidents in the region, the semi-official Anatolia news
agency reported on Friday.

Ministry of Interior Affairs charged two chief inspectors to
investigate whether there was any failure or negligence of the local
administration and the provincial security department, according to
the report.

Last year, Andrea Santaro, Italian Roman-Catholic priest of the Santa
Maria Church, was shot dead by a teenager in Trabzon where he was the
parish priest for a small Christian community.

The key suspects of the killing of journalist Hrant Dink were also
from the province.

Hrant Dink, a 53-year-old outspoken Turkish journalist of Armenian
descent, was shot dead in front of his office building in Istanbul
last Friday. The killing has ignited a national public outcry since
then.

Last Saturday, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced
that Ogun Samast, the suspected killer, was arrested in the northern
province of Samsun earlier in the day.

Before his killing, Dink had been convicted by the Article 301 of the
Penal Code of insulting Turkey’s identity over his comments on the
alleged Armenian genocide by Ottoman Turks during World War I and
received a six-month suspended sentence.

He had also received threat from nationalists who considered him as a
traitor, local media reported.

Turkey has denied that up to 1.5 million Armenians died as a result
of systematic genocide during the Turkish Ottoman period between 1915
and 1923.

Source: Xinhua