TURKEY SEEKS HEAVY SENTENCES OVER ARMENIAN JOURNALIST’S MURDER

Agence France Presse — English
May 7, 2007 Monday

Turkish prosecutors sought heavy prison terms for 18 people over the
murder of an ethnic Armenian journalist which they said was the work
of a terrorist organization, the Anatolia news agency reported Monday.

The trial is expected to start on July 2, the semi-official agency
said.

Hrant Dink’s murder on January 19 raised alarm about rising nationalism
and hostility against minorities in Turkey. The journalist’s funeral
turned into a huge demonstration as some 100,000 people marched behind
his coffin, calling for tolerance and reconciliation with Armenia.

The indictment calls for life sentences for two alleged ringleaders
who instigated the killing in which Dink, 52, was gunned down outside
the offices of his Turkish-Armenian weekly Agos in Istanbul.

One of them, university student Erhan Tuncel, also faces an additional
prison term between 22.5 and 48 years on other charges including
being a leader of a terrorist organization.

The indictment calls for an additional sentence of 18 to 30 years
in jail for the second man, Yasin Hayal, on other charges including
being a leader of a terrorist organisation.

Hayal is believed to have provided the money and gun used in the
murder.

The two prosecutors demanded a prison term between 18 and 24 years
for Ogun Samast, a 17-year-old jobless secondary school graduate who
confessed to shooting Dink.

Samast also faces an additional prison term of between 8.5 to 18
years for being a member of a terrorist organization and carrying an
unlicensed gun.

The indictment calls for prison terms between 7.5 and 35 years for
the remaining 15 suspects for helping in the murder.

The prosecutors considered the group as a terrorist organisation,
which aggravates the sentences sought for the crime.

Most of the suspects are from the Black Sea city of Trabzon — a
bastion of nationalism — and are believed to have targeted Dink for
his views on the World War I killings of Armenians under Ottoman rule.

Dink described the 1915-1918 killings as genocide, a label that Turkey,
the Ottoman Empire’s successor, categorically rejects.

Nationalists branded him a traitor after he was given a suspended
six-month jail sentence last year for "insulting Turkishness".

One of the charges brought against Hayal was related to him threatening
Turkish Nobel-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk, who was also charged
over remarks about the Armenian massacres, but escaped trial thanks
to a technicality.

Dink, one of the most prominent members of Turkey’s tiny Armenian
minority, was widely respected as a sincere campaigner for reconciling
Turkey and Armenia, which have failed to establish diplomatic ties
over the genocide dispute.