SECRET WITNESS REVEALS DINK’S MURDER INVOLVED TEAMWORK

Today’s Zaman
May 12 2010
Turkey

A group that gathered at the BeÅ~_iktaÅ~_ dock on Monday held a
protest to demand that the details in Dink’s murder emerge. They
carried banners reading "We know who the murderers are" and "For Hrant,
for Justice."

The drilling of a secret witness during the latest hearing on the
assassination of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, who was
fatally shot by an ultranationalist teenager outside the headquarters
of the Agos weekly in 2007, revealed that Dink’s murder was the
result of a group effort, raising renewed suspicions of a possible
police cover-up.

A secret witness identified Osman Hayal, Yasin Hayal and Ogun Samast,
who claims to be the murderer, as suspects at the 13th hearing of the
Dink trial, held on Monday. Osman Hayal contested the secret witness’
statement and added that he and his brother could not be accomplices.

Police records from the Trabzon Police department show Yasin Hayal
was in Trabzon at the time of the murder.

Samast said he committed the murder alone and that Osman and Yasin
Hayal were nowhere near him.

"Is the Trabzon Police Department telling the truth?" asked Dink family
lawyer Arzu Becerik while answering questions from Today’s Zaman.

"There are already leads making us think the police had been tipped
off about the planned assassination more than once before Dink’s
murder but had failed to prevent it. And now if the testimony of the
secret witness is correct, we legitimately question the truthfulness
of the police again," she said.

The secret witness, whose voice was distorted, said s/he saw the murder
while walking outside an Akbank branch toward the Agos building. One
person who approached Dink from the front had a seconds-long talk with
him. Then two other people approached Dink, one of them tall and thin,
wearing jeans and a jacket. The witness also said that s/he did not
notice if the main suspect was wearing a white cap. Regarding the
other person who approached Dink, the witness said this person was
wearing a striped sweater and a heavy jacket and that he was plump
and had curly hair.

"I saw four or five people related to the incident. They were talking
to each other. They were standing on the sidewalk where Dink was
killed. Following the incident, one person escaped from the scene.

This was the brother of Yasin Hayal," said the witness, who was
also asked to identify the suspects. The court officials brought the
defendants to the front and placed them among the other defendants
in the case.

The secret witness identified Osman Hayal, Yasin Hayal and Samast
from among the others when their pictures were projected into the
room where s/he was located.

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. Police arrested Samast and Yasin Hayal a few days
later. There are 20 suspects in the case. With Monday’s release of
two more suspects, Ahmet Ä°skender and Ersin Yolcu, only Samast, Yasin
Hayal and Erhan Tuncel, a former police informant who is believed to
have supplied the hit man with a gun, remain under arrest. The court
rejected the co-plaintiff lawyers’ demand for the arrest of Osman
Hayal. So far 17 suspects have been released pending trial. The next
hearing will be on July 12.

The court also ruled that the Ä°stanbul Gendarmerie Central Command
should be asked whether or not it made extortion payments to Erhan
Ozen, currently an inmate at Amasya Prison, who wanted to voluntarily
testify in the Dink case. Ozen, whose demand to be a secret witness
was not taken seriously, claimed at Monday’s hearing that he worked
for JÄ°TEM, a secret and illegal military intelligence agency, and
was paid by the Ä°stanbul Gendarmerie Central Command.

Ozen said a group of people had a project to take pictures of the
surroundings of Agos, and he was part of that team. He also said
Tuncel, Osman Hayal and Yasil Hayal worked for JÄ°TEM.

"We have many more demands of the court to probe the case deeper,
but the court failed to do that," Becerik said.

"Even though there are renewed suspicions about the failures of the
police in the process, our demands have been rejected by the court,"
she added.

Among many others, one issue she was referring to is the fact that
Akbank’s security camera recordings, which were taken by the Ä°stanbul
Police Department right after the assassination, have been cut. The
recordings, which were edited by the police before being presented
in court on grounds that the police had to cut several people from
the footage for security reasons, do not show Yasin Hayal.

"Indeed, the recordings show the witnesses but not the suspects,"
Becerik pointed out, noting that another witness had also indicated
that Yasin Hayal was at the murder scene. Becerik also said Akbank
officials say they gave the recordings to the police without editing
or distorting them.

On Monday, the Dink family’s lawyers requested that the hard disk
belonging to Akbank be sent to the Scientific and Technological
Research Council of Turkey (TUBÄ°TAK) in order to determine whether
or not it was irreversibly distorted. The court accepted the request.

The trial also revealed that officials from the Trabzon Police
Department had contacted Ä°stanbul police and informed them that Yasin
Hayal would come to Ä°stanbul to kill Dink. The Ä°stanbul police,
however, did nothing, but prepared reports to show that it had.

The Dink family lawyers have long argued that, in order to solve the
murder case, there is a need to see the whole picture that led to
Dink’s murder. "We cannot do that with one separate case in Trabzon,
another in Samsun and yet another in Ä°stanbul. They need to be merged,
but the court won’t do that," Becerik said.

Another revelation that came at the latest hearing of the trial
showed that some defendants in the Ergenekon case were in contact
with defendants in the Dink case.

A report sent from the Ä°stanbul Police Department to the court
hearing the Dink case said six defendants in the trial of Ergenekon,
a terrorist organization whose members stand accused of planning to
overthrow the government by staging a coup, had telephone conversations
with defendants in the Dink case prior to Dink’s murder.

According to the report, these Ergenekon suspects include Veli Kucuk,
Kemal Kerincsiz, Mustafa Levent GöktaÅ~_, Muzaffer Tekin and Erbay
Colakoglu.

However, Becerik said this information relates to the preparation
phase of Dink’s murder. She said that prior to his murder, Dink was
tried on grounds of insulting Turkishness through statements in one of
his articles and that Kucuk came to the hearings with his supporters
who were ready to lynch Dink.

The Dink family’s lawyers demanded in February that the court
investigate whether Dink’s killing was part of the Cage plan, an
alleged military plot to create panic and chaos exposed by the Taraf
daily late last year. The plan mostly focused on killing non-Muslims
and bombing mosques to create turmoil that would eventually help
the plotters take over the government. A prosecutor is examining the
indictment into the plot to find possible links. The Cage plan calls
the killings of Dink, Catholic priest Father Andrea Santoro and three
Christians in Malatya an "operation."

"Our hope is to reveal the masterminds of the Dink murder and public
officials who had negligence of duty in preventing the assassination
and again public officials who played a role in cover-ups after the
murder," Becerik said.