Agence France Presse — English
January 30, 2007 Tuesday 2:31 PM GMT

Turkish police failed to act on tip-off on journalist’s murder: press

Turkish authorities are investigating claims that police received
intelligence last year of a plan to kill ethnic Armenian journalist
Hrant Dink but failed to act on it, a senior official said.

"We are looking into allegations regarding Erhan Tuncel," an alleged
police informer and one of the six suspects charged in connection
with the January 19 killing of Dink, the Anatolia news agency quoted
Istanbul Governor Muammer Guler as saying late Monday.

Several reports in the Turkish press Tuesday said Tuncel, a
university student in the northern city of Trabzon with links to the
ultranationalist group blamed for the killing, warned local police in
February 2006 of a plan to assassinate the prominent journalist.

Tuncel reportedly told police that Yasin Hayal, also under arrest in
connection with the murder, planned to travel from Trabzon to
Istanbul to kill Dink, the 52-year-old editor of the bilingual
Turkish-Armenian weekly Agos.

The informant furnished the address where Hayal would stay in
Istanbul, the mass-circulation Sabah said.

The intelligence was passed on to Istanbul police, who found nothing
suspicious at the address and took no further action, the liberal
Milliyet reported.

It said Tuncel turned informer in 2004 in exchange for immunity after
he was detained in connection with a bomb attack on a McDonald’s
restaurant in Trabzon, for which Hayal served 11 months in jail.

In the summer of 2006, police stopped working with Tuncel on
suspicion that he was a double agent, Milliyet said.

Dink, branded a "traitor" by nationalists for urging open debate on
the massacres of Armenians under the Ottoman Empire, which he termed
genocide, was shot three times in the head outside the Agos offices
in central Istanbul.

A Turkish court has charged Ogun Samast, a 17-year-old unemployed
middle school graduate, with the murder.

Hayal is believed to have given Samast money and the gun that killed
Dink and Tuncel is suspects of instigating the murder.

Apart from the six people already charged, police said they detained
two others on Monday and three more on Tuesday.

The identities of the five new suspects, who are being interrogated
by Istanbul police, have not been disclosed.