DINK DREAMT OF ERGENEKON TRIAL
PanARMENIAN.Net
19.01.2010 13:22 GMT+04:00
/PanARMENIAN.Net/ If Hrant Dink, murdered in 2007 in front of his
newspaper office, were alive today, he would have been happy with
the Ergenekon trials, Agos Editor Sarkis Seropyan said Monday.
"If Hrant were alive and saw the Ergenekon case, he would have been
extremely happy," Seropyan said. "He would have supported the Ergenekon
case much more than what we are able to do at Agos. He would not have
been satisfied just by presenting the news related to Ergenekon."
"It was his dream that those people’s masks would drop," Seropyan
said, referring to alleged members of Ergenekon investigated by the
Istanbul Public Prosecutor’s Office, Today’s Zaman reported.
The Ergenekon case in Turkey has been investigating a neo-nationalist
gang believed to be the extension of a clandestine network of groups
with members in the armed forces and accused of being behind a number
of unsolved murders of journalists, academics, public-opinion leaders
and writers.
Hrant Dink (September 15, 1954 – January 19, 2007) was a
Turkish-Armenian journalist and columnist and editor-in-chief
of Agos bilingual newspaper. Dink was best known for advocating
Turkish-Armenian reconciliation and human and minority rights in
Turkey. Charged under the notorious article 301 of the Turkish
Criminal Code, Dink stood a trial for insulting Turkishness. After
numerous death threats, Hrant Dink was assassinated in Istanbul in
January 2007, by Ogun Samast, a 17-year old Turkish nationalist.
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. Although three
years have passed since Dink was killed, the investigation into his
brutal murder has yielded no conclusion.