Monday Morning, Lebanon
Jan 29 2007

Turkey: Police probing ultra-nationalist leads in slaying of Hrant
Dink

Photo: A grave being prepared for Hrant Dink, the Armenian-Turkish
journalist whose life was devoted to promoting freedom of speech and
the reconciliation of Armenians and Turks

Turkish police have been focusing their investigation into the murder
of the ethnic Armenian journalist Hrant Dink on alleged links between
the prime suspect and an ultra-nationalist group.

`We’re looking into the political aspect of the murder and possible
links with illegal organizations’, Istanbul police chief Celalettin
Cerrah told the Anatolia news agency.
A prosecutor said that the suspect, 17-year-old Ogun Samast, had
confessed to the murder on January 19 and newspapers quoted the
teenager as telling police he shot Dink because the journalist
`insulted the Turkish nation’.
Dink, 52, was a taboo-breaking critic of the official line on the
1915-17 massacre by the Ottoman authorities of Armenians, which he
labeled as genocide, and was given a suspended six-month jail
sentence last year for `insulting Turkishness’.
Nationalists branded him a `traitor’ and Dink wrote in recent
articles in his weekly Armenian-Turkish newspaper Agos that he had
received threats.
Quoting sources close to the investigation, newspapers said police
were probing links between Samast and a small, extremist group in his
home city, Trabzon, on the Black Sea coast.
Samast told police he was told to kill Dink by a friend, Yasin Hayal,
who spent 11 months in jail for a 2004 bomb attack against a
McDonald’s restaurant in Trabzon.
`Yasin told me to shoot Dink. He gave me the gun. So I did’, the
mass-circulation Hürriyet newspaper quoted the teenager as saying.
Turkish newspapers described Hayal, also in police custody, as an
`older brother’ figure who frequently met youngsters in the area and
influenced them with his ultra-nationalist views.
Hürriyet said Samast, an unemployed secondary school graduate, was
among 10 youths aged 15 to 17 whom Hayal had last year trained to
handle and shoot small arms in order to assassinate Dink.
Apart from Samast and Hayal, police were questioning six other
suspects in connection with the killing.
Police conducted a re-enactment under heavy security of the murder
with Samast, which saw passers-by booing the teenager and calling him
a `disgrace’.
Showing no remorse, Samast reportedly told police that he first tried
to meet Dink in his office but was not allowed in by suspicious
staff. He said he waited in the street until Dink returned from a
nearby bank.
`I approached him from behind and fired shot after shot’, Samast was
quoted by the Vatan newspaper as saying. Dink died instantly after
being shot three times in the head and neck.
Samast’s testimony turned the spotlight on Trabzon, a Black Sea port
of one million and a hot-bed of nationalism, which hit the headlines
in February 2006 with the murder of an Italian Catholic priest by a
16-year-old boy.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said the police would
look into possible links between Dink’s killing and that of the
priest.
Hated by Turkish nationalists, at times misunderstood by his kinsmen,
Dink was also admired by many in Turkey and abroad for his commitment
to dialogue and reconciliation between the two communities.
`Because he sought reconciliation through truth, he was hated by
hard-liners on both sides. He was a target’, said an editorial in the
English-language daily Today’s Zaman.
Dink risked attack not only by his use of the word `genocide’ but
also by defending in court other people who faced prosecution for
expressing their opinions, notably Nobel Literature Prize laureate
Orhan Pamuk as well as novelist Perihan Magden, who hailed Dink as `a
true patriot’ and `a man with a great heart’.
Born into a modest family in Malatya, Eastern Turkey, Dink moved with
his parents to Istanbul at the age of seven.
He studied philosophy and zoology and took various jobs, including
with the Armenian Church, running a children’s holiday camp and a
bookshop, before founding Agos in 1996.
He was buried last week at an Armenian cemetery in Istanbul after a
ceremony in front of the Agos offices and a religious service at the
Armenian Patriarchate in Istanbul. A Turkish diplomat said that
Ankara had invited prominent Armenian religious leaders from around
the world to attend the funeral.
The issue has further poisoned ties between neighbors Turkey and
Armenia; Ankara recognized Yerevan’s independence in 1991 but no
diplomatic relations were established and the border between the two
has been closed since 1993.