A court in Turkey has sentenced several former police chiefs and security officials to life in prison in the 2007 murder of Hrant Dink, a prominent Turkish journalist of Armenian origin whose killing became a rallying cry for the country’s Armenian minority.
Dink, the 52-year-old editor of the Armenian-Turkish newspaper Agos, was gunned down in broad daylight on a crowded Istanbul street after leaving his office. The shooter, Omar Samast, was an unemployed 17-year-old who said he viewed Dink as a traitor to Turkey. Samast was sentenced in 2011 to nearly 23 years in prison.
Photos emerged showing Samast posing with police officers after the murder, raising questions of possible collusion. At the time, the Sabah daily newspaper charged that Samast, who had confessed to Dink’s murder, was receiving “hero treatment” from Turkish authorities.
The state-owned Anadolu news agency reported that the court on Friday concluded that Dink’s murder was "in line with the objectives” of the network run by Fethullah Gulen, who the government accuses of organizing the failed 2016 coup. Gulen, who has lived in self-imposed exile in rural Pennsylvania since 1999, denies involvement.
Of the 76 people facing charges in the Dink case, at least 26 were sentenced by Istanbul’s top court Friday, the Bianet news organization said. The Hurriyet Daily News said a separate trial will be held for Gulen and “12 other fugitive defendants.” The rest were acquitted or had the charges dropped against them, some because of the statute of limitations.
Those sentenced included Istanbul’s former police intelligence chief Ramazan Akyurek and his second-in-command, Ali Fuat Yilmazer. Both were handed life sentences for “premeditated murder,” along with 7.5 years for “forgery and destroying official documents.”
Former Interior Ministry officials Yavuz Karakaya and Muharrem Demirkale were also sentenced to life in prison, and a former commander in the ministry, Ali Oz, received 28 years.
Reporters Without Borders, which ranked Turkey 154th out of 180 countries in the watchdog’s 2020 Press Freedom Index, said everyone connected with Dink’s murder must be tried in order for justice to be served.
“This partial justice rendered after 14 years leaves a bitter taste and, above all, must not signify the end of the search for the truth,” Reporters Without Borders Turkey representative Erol Onderoglu said in a statement.
A lawyer for Dink’s family in 2019 asked the European Court of Human Rights to probe Turkey’s decision not to prosecute 26 people over smear and hate campaigns targeting the journalist before his murder.
Dink sought to improve relations between the Turkish government and the country’s small Armenian population, but he angered nationalists by referring to the century-old massacre of 1.5 million Armenians as a genocide. He was facing charges of "denigrating Turkishness” at the time of this death.
President Joe Biden is expected to become the first US president to recognize the genocide, fulfilling a campaign promise and dealing another blow to already strained US-Turkey relations.