TURKISH PARLIAMENTARY RIGHTS COMMITTEE TO QUESTION MILITARY OFFICERS IN DINK PROBE
NTV MSNBC
April 18 2008
Turkey
Istanbul’s governor announced on Thursday that investigators had been
given permission to question eight police officers involved in the
Dink murder case.
ANKARA – The Turkish parliament’s Human Rights Committee is to call
a number of officers of the country’s paramilitary Gendarme to submit
evidence on investigation into the murder of prominent Turkish-Armenian
journalist Hrant Dink.
Committee chairman Zafer Uskul said that the officers would be called
to appear before the committee soon.
Dink, the editor of the Turkish-Armenian newspaper Argo and a leading
human rights activist, was gunned down outside the paper’s head office
in Istanbul on January 19 last year.
More than 20 people have been charged in connection with involvement
his killing, including a youth aged 17 at the time of the incident
who is accused of carrying out the shooting. Many of those charged
are from the Black Sea province of Trabzon.
Two senior non-commissioned officers of the Gendarme in Trabzon have
been charged with dereliction of duty over the killing, the men being
accused of not passing on information that there was a plot to murder
Dink. Both have denied the charges, alleging that senior Gendarme
officers suppressed the information after they had passed it on.
Acting on their testimonies, a Trabzon court ordered an investigation
be carried out into 10 other gendarmerie officers, including a colonel.