Hurriyet Daily News, Turkey
Jan 23 2015

Arrested policemen begin blame game in Dink case

ISTANBUL

Officers arrested in the murder case of Armenian-Turkish journalist
Hrant Dink have joined the civilian suspects in blaming one-time
allies or colleagues for the killing, after the inspection was
recently widened.

Policeman Muhittin Zenit, one of the key suspects in the case who was
arrested last week, said his superiors used him as bait, forcing him
to talk on the phone with one of the organizers of the assassination.

Zenit said in his testimony that four of his superiors wanted him to
talk to Erhan Tuncel, one of the figures behind the convicted
triggerman Ogün Samast, on Jan. 19, 2007, the day Dink was killed,
according to a report on the Radikal news portal on Jan. 23.

Zenit said the superiors were Ali Fuat Yılmazer, then-Istanbul police
intelligence chief, and Engin Dinç and Faruk Sarı, the two Trabzon
police intel chiefs at the time, adding that Trabzon branch chief
Ercan Demir wanted him to call Tuncel.

`I see the people who I think was negligent in the murder used me as
bait,’ he told the judge on Jan. 22. `The real suspects have hidden
themselves.’

The triggerman also alleged last month that then-Trabzon police chief
Ramazan Akyürek and Yılmazer were behind the murder.

Samast assassinated Dink in broad daylight on a busy street outside
the office of the bilingual Turkish-Armenian weekly Agos in Istanbul’s
Ã…?iÃ…?li district. Samast is serving a sentence of 22 years and 10 months
in a high-security prison. Yusuf Hayal and Tuncel are accused of
encouraging Samast to kill Dink, in the Black Sea province of Trabzon.

Civil servants and institutions allegedly implicated in the murder
should be investigated, the Constitutional Court ruled on July 17,
2014. The ruling became a milestone in the case that has been
lingering since the killing in 2007.

On Jan. 23, however, a court rejected Dink’s family’s request for the
inspection to be deepened, ruling that such a move would cause the
issue to linger even longer.

A group, `Friends of Hrant,’ gathered in front of the courthouse as
the decision was being made. Aydın Engin, a journalist with the group,
said the government’s efforts to put the blame for the murder entirely
on the so-called `parallel structure,’ a symbolic phrase used by top
officials for the Gülenist movement, was unconvincing.

January/23/2015