Agence France Presse — English
January 26, 2007 Friday

Two more suspects in court over journalist’s murder: report

Two more people suspected of involvement in the killing of
Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink were brought to court here
Friday to face possible charges, the Anatolia news agency reported.

One of them, Erhan Tuncel, is a university student close to an
ultra-nationalist group who reportedly agitated young people in the
northern city of Trabzon, where the suspected assailant, 17-year-old
Ogun Samast, comes from.

The second person who was to appear before court allegedly sent an
e-mail to Samast, congratulating him for Dink’s murder.

Samast, a jobless secondary school graduate, and four other suspects
were charged over Dink’s January 19 shooting in Istanbul and jailed
pending trial on Wednesday.

One of the accused, Yasin Hayal, 26, is believed to have frequently
met with Tuncel and allegedly instigated Samast to kill Dink, giving
him money and the gun.

Hayal served 11 months in jail over a 2004 bomb blast outside a
McDonald’s restaurant in Trabzon.

The investigation so far has suggested that the suspects, most of
them from Trabzon, did not belong to any known underground
organisation and wanted to take the matter in their own hands against
what they believed to be rising threats to Turkey’s unity.

Trabzon, a nationalist stronghold, has come under the media spotlight
with a series of violent incidents, including the shooting of a Roman
Catholic priest by a 16-year-old boy last year.

Dink, editor of the bilingual Turkish-Armenian weekly Agos and one of
Turkey’s most prominent ethnic Armenians, was branded a "traitor" by
nationalists for calling for on open debate on the massacres of
Armenians under the Ottoman Empire — a taboo topic until recently —
which he labeled as genocide.

He was last year given a six-month suspended sentence for insulting
"Turkishness."

But Dink also won respect as a sincere campaigner for
Turkish-Armenian reconciliation and was critical of Armenian
fanaticism.

Some 100,000 protestors marched at his funeral Tuesday in one of the
largest public gatherings in Istanbul in recent years, brandishing
banners that read "We are all Armenians."

The murder of Dink, shot three times from behind outside the Agos
office in downtown Istanbul, has sparked a heated debate over rising
nationalism in Turkey.