Turkish Daily News
Jan 27 2007
Nationalist group warns of bomb attacks
Saturday, January 27, 2007
Hıdır Göktaş
ANKARA – Reuters
A shadowy ultranationalist group placed a fake bomb outside
Turkey’s Parliament on Thursday, threatening real explosions unless
men involved in the politically-charged murder of an Armenian editor
are released.
Police said they blew up a small package outside Parliament which
carried a note from a group calling itself the Turkish Revenge
Brigade (TIT) calling for Ogun Samast and Yasin Hayal, two key
suspects, to be freed.
A police official told Reuters the note threatened "real big
explosions" if the two were not released.
TIT has claimed responsibility for numerous deadly attacks in
Turkey but many question the validity of their statements.
Istanbul’s chief prosecutor, Aykut Cengiz Engin, has charged
Samast, an unemployed 17-year-old from the Black Sea coast, with
premeditated murder and membership in an armed group.
Hayal, a known nationalist militant, and three others have been
charged with forming an armed organization and incitement to murder.
Hayal has admitted to inciting his friend Samast to kill Dink,
police have said.
The murder brought 100,000 mourners onto Istanbul’s streets for
Dink’s funeral on Tuesday and reignited debate about hardline
nationalism in a country seeking European Union membership.
Samast, reported to have been close to an ultranationalist group in
his home town Trabzon, has admitted to shooting Dink as he left his
bilingual Turkish-Armenian weekly newspaper Agos in Istanbul last
Friday.
"From the quality and the nature of the crimes attributed to the
suspects it is clear the result emerges that they formed an armed
group," Engin told reporters late on Wednesday in comments reported
by the NTV Web site.
Engin said the suspects had been remanded in custody. Two more
suspects, who have not been charged, are due to appear in an Istanbul
court for initial hearings on Friday.
Nationalism:
According to police, prosecutors and Samast’s own lawyer, he has
confessed to killing Dink for "insulting" Turks in his writings and
statements on the massacres of Armenians during World War I – a
highly sensitive issue in Turkey.
Dink, who worked for reconciliation between Christian Armenians and
Muslim Turks, had been prosecuted for his views on the massacres of
Armenians by Ottoman Turks in 1915.
He was among intellectuals, including Nobel Prize in Literature
winner Orhan Pamuk, who have been prosecuted under laws restricting
freedom of expression in Turkey.
Turkey denies claims by Armenia and other countries that 1.5
million Armenians died in a systematic genocide at Turkish hands,
saying large numbers of both Christian Armenians and Muslim Turks
perished during the breakup of the Ottoman Empire.
Hayal served 11 months in jail for the 2004 bombing of a McDonald’s
restaurant in Trabzon.