MURDERED JOURNALIST DINK CASE STILL ONGOING, SAYS TURKISH MINISTER
Deutsche Presse-Agentur
Jan 18 2012
Germany
Jan. 18–ISTANBUL — Legal action relating to the murder by right-wing
Turkish nationalists in 2007 of Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant
Dink are still ongoing, Turkey’s state news agency Anatolian reported
Wednesday.
Dink was shot dead in 2007 outside his Istanbul office. An
ultra-nationalist sympathizer Ogun Samast, who was 17 at the time of
the killing, to 23 years in prison for having committed the murder.
On Tuesday a court in Istanbul convicted one defendant Yasin Hayal
for having incited the killing and sentenced him to life imprisonment
but cleared a second defendant of involvement.
Turkish Justice Minister Sadullah Ergin said Wednesday that the case
will continue in Turkey’s supreme court.
“This trial is not finished, the process is ongoing,” he was quoted
as saying.
Controversially, the Istanbul court rejected allegations that Dink’s
murder was the result of an organized conspiracy.
Lawyers acting for the convicted killer have long claimed that the
killing was connected to an alleged military backed group dubbed
“Ergenekon.”
Several trials are currently ongoing in the Ergenekon affair.
Dink, who was the editor of the Turkish-Armenian weekly newspaper Agos,
is believed to have been murdered due to having described massacres
of Armenians in the latter years of the Ottoman Empire as “genocide”.
Turkey accepts that massacres took place but denies that they
constituted “genocide”. Author: David O’Byrne