GENDARMES INFORMED ABOUT DINK MURDER PLAN, CAPTAIN TESTIFIES
Today’s Zaman
June 9 2009
Turkey
A captain serving at the Trabzon Gendarmerie Command testified to
prosecutors on Monday that he informed the provincial gendarmerie
commander and other officers in the city about an assassination plot
against Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink.
"Okan Å~^imÅ~_ek and Veysel Å~^ahin [both gendarmes] gave me
a phone call in the summer of 2006 and told me about a plan to
murder Dink. They said Yasin Hayal [a suspect in the Dink murder]
was preparing the plot. When I asked them how they had received the
information, they said a man called CoÅ~_kun Ä°gci had informed them
about it," stated Capt. Metin Yıldız.
Dink was gunned down on Jan. 19, 2007 in broad daylight in front
of the headquarters of the bilingual Armenian weekly Agos, where he
was editor-in-chief.
An investigation in the wake of the Dink assassination revealed that
a group of ultranationalists was behind the murder. Strong evidence
suggested that some members of the group had ties with the police
department in northern Trabzon, the hometown of the plotters. Some
gendarmes later confirmed that they had been tipped off about the
plot to kill Dink before the murder was committed.
"I shared this information with the provincial gendarmerie
commander and other officials. I asked them to investigate the
information. … Then we heard that Dink had been killed," Yıldız
added.