TURKEY CHARGES 11TH SUSPECT OVER MURDER OF JOURNALIST

Agence France Presse — English
April 11, 2007 Wednesday 4:02 PM GMT

An Istanbul court on Wednesday charged an eleventh suspect over
the murder of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, Anatolia news
agency reported.

The court charged Mustafa Ozturk with being an accomplice in the
January 19 killing and aiding a criminal organisation. It remanded
him in custody pending trial.

Ozturk had been questioned by police in February and was subsequently
released by a court, but the prosecutor in charge of the investigation
appealed and secured an arrest warrant in his name.

He was caught last month in a house raid in the eastern city of
Erzurum.

Among the 11 suspects is the alleged assailant, a 17-year-old jobless
secondary school graduate who officials say has confessed to gunning
down Dink, 52, outside the offices of his Turkish-Armenian weekly
Agos in Istanbul.

Prosecutors have yet to complete their indictment on Dink’s murder.

Dink was branded a traitor by nationalists for urging open debate
on the World War I massacres of Armenians under the Ottoman Empire,
which he labelled as genocide, a label that Ankara fiercely rejects.

He was given a suspended six-month sentence last year for "insulting
Turkishness" under a penal code article that has been used to prosecute
a number of intellectuals and raised alarms about freedom of speech
in Turkey.