ISTANBUL POLICE INTELLIGENCE CHIEF SUSPENDED IN PROBE INTO ARMENIAN JOURNALIST’S KILLING

International Herald Tribune, France
Feb 6 2007

ANKARA, Turkey: Authorities suspended the police intelligence chief
of Istanbul as part of an investigation into the killing of an ethnic
Armenian journalist in the city last month, police said Tuesday.

The Interior Ministry suspended intelligence chief Ahmet Ilhan Guler
on Monday evening following the Jan. 19 killing of Hrant Dink. The
daily Sabah newspaper reported he was removed from his post because
he had ignored a tip about a threat against Dink’s life a year ago.

The 52-year-old journalist had angered Turkish nationalists with
repeated assertions that the mass killings of Armenians around the
time of World War I was genocide.

Interior Ministry inspectors investigating the journalist’s death
reportedly discovered that Guler failed to report a tip – which
he received 11 months before the deadly attack – that some of the
suspects in Dink’s killing were planning to assassinate the journalist.

Dink’s death led to an outpouring of public sympathy for the journalist
and focused attention on a law in Turkey which makes it a crime to
insult the country or the Turkish national character.

Journalists and writers who spoke openly on controversial topics,
including Dink and Nobel Prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk, have been
prosecuted under the law, which critics say hampers free speech.

More than 100,000 people marched at Dink’s funeral, many of them
chanting for Turkey to abolish the law.

The government pledged to hold a speedy investigation into Dink’s
killing, and has already suspended the governor and police chief of
Trabzon, the city on the Black Sea coast where suspects in the killing
lived. Several other police officers were also suspended for posing
with the 17-year-old killer after his capture in the Black Sea port
city of Samsun.