COURT ASKED ABOUT THREATS AGAINST DINK

Turkish Daily News
July 9 2008
Turkey

ISTANBUL – Turkish Daily News

The court hearing the murder case of Turkish-Armenian journalist
Hrant Dink asked yet again for the Istanbul Police Department to
submit information that police had received about threats on the
victim’s life prior to his murder, in an interlocutory decision Monday.

If the police department did not send the information, legal action
would be started against the officials under an allegation of neglect
of duty, the court decision said. Dink had said before his murder
that he was threatened in Istanbul governor’s office by two people
who were allegedly intelligence officials.

The court also asked the Trabzon Police Department for the identities
of some code names that Erhan Tuncel, the suspected inciter of the
murder, who was alleged to be a former police informer, gave in his
testimony recently.

The court then accepted the demands of Tuncel and the Dink
family’s lawyers to listen to Engin Dinc and Ercan Demir, two police
intelligence officials in Trabzon, adding their names to the witness
list.

Trabzon is the Black Sea province that was the hometown of the
suspects.

Link with Santoro case?

The court also asked about the situation with the case file on Catholic
priest Andrea Santoro’s murder in Trabzon. The court demanded the
case file in order to examine whether the legal process in the case
was complete in the Supreme Court of Appeals. Santoro, 61, was shot
to death by a 16-year-old teenager in his church in Trabzon on Feb. 5,
2006. The teenager was sentenced to 18 years and nine months in prison,
but his lawyer appealed the decision.

The identities of those people who communicated with Tuncel over
e-mail, and Microsoft’s Internet service, MSN, addresses that other
suspects revealed in their petitions to the court, will be determined
as well. The court asked the Microsoft corporation’s Istanbul office
to identify the IP addresses of those people Tuncel contacted, and
the dates of the communications. The bank accounts of the suspects
and those of relatives of Ogun Samast, the murder suspect, will be
examined as well. The court also asked for the list of visitors and
for money inflow and outflow in the name of Yasin Hayal, a suspected
inciter, while he was incarcerated in BayrampaÅ~_a prison.

Trial of leaking images goes on

The trial of two police officers will continue today in Samsun on
charges that the two officers leaked video images of Hrant Dink’s
murder suspect Ogun Samast after he was arrested and of keeping the
suspect in the police department cafe in Samsun instead of in jail,
the independent news site BÄ°ANET reported.

However, the police officers that posed with Samast in front of a
calendar with a Turkish flag and a saying from Ataturk, the founder
of the Republic, on it have not been judged. The motion by the Dink
family’s lawyers to judge the officers was rejected by the court. The
court today will decide about giving the whole video records to the
family’s lawyers.

–Boundary_(ID_9Vjhe2sr+XArTrmFjQKEfg)–