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TURKISH PRESS DENOUNCES COURT RULING IN DINK CASE
Agence France Presse
January 18, 2012 Wednesday 9:50 AM GMT
Turkish newspapers reacted angrily Wednesday after a court rejected
claims that the 2007 murder of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink
had been part of a wider conspiracy.
"They shot Hrant again," said the leftist daily Birgun, after the
court sentenced 31-year-old Yasin Hayal for incitement to murder
while acquitting several other defendants and dismissing talk of
a conspiracy.
"The plot was a hallucination," said daily Radikal and daily HaberTurk,
a pun on Hayal, the surname of the instigator of the murder: "hayal"
means dream or hallucination in Turkish.
The liberal Taraf daily blamed what it called the "white-capped state",
referring to a white cap Dink's murderer was wearing on the day of
the crime.
Dink was shot dead on a busy street outside his bilingual Agos
newspaper in downtown Istanbul.
His assassination sent shockwaves through Turkey and grew into a wider
scandal after reports that state security forces had known of a plot
to kill him but failed to act.
Dink's self-confessed murderer, Ogun Samast, a jobless high-school
dropout who was 17 years old at the time, was sentenced to nearly 23
years in prison last July.
But while the court in Istanbul convicted Hayal, sentencing him to
life imprisonment, it acquitted more than a dozen other suspects,
provoking uproar in court and a furious response from the journalist's
family and lawyers.
Tuesday's court ruling said the killing of Dink -- who had angered
nationalists with his views on Turkish-Armenian history -- was not
planned in a wider conspiracy, as his supporters had alleged.
"Have they (prosecutors and judges) really probed conspiracy? I don't
think so," wrote Rusen Cakir in his column in daily Vatan.
"This government wants us to believe that Hrant Dink was killed ... by
a couple of young people who were bored," columnist Yasemin Congar
wrote in Taraf.
"And the government does not see that Dink's trial is a great
opportunity to clear the dark face of the state with the light of
the reality," she said.
Dink, 52, was a leading member of Turkey's tiny Armenian community
and had campaigned for reconciliation between Turks and Armenians
over their bloody history.
Nationalists however hated him for calling the massacres of Armenians
under Ottoman rule a genocide, a label that Turkey fiercely rejects.
Agence France Presse
January 18, 2012 Wednesday 9:50 AM GMT
Turkish newspapers reacted angrily Wednesday after a court rejected
claims that the 2007 murder of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink
had been part of a wider conspiracy.
"They shot Hrant again," said the leftist daily Birgun, after the
court sentenced 31-year-old Yasin Hayal for incitement to murder
while acquitting several other defendants and dismissing talk of
a conspiracy.
"The plot was a hallucination," said daily Radikal and daily HaberTurk,
a pun on Hayal, the surname of the instigator of the murder: "hayal"
means dream or hallucination in Turkish.
The liberal Taraf daily blamed what it called the "white-capped state",
referring to a white cap Dink's murderer was wearing on the day of
the crime.
Dink was shot dead on a busy street outside his bilingual Agos
newspaper in downtown Istanbul.
His assassination sent shockwaves through Turkey and grew into a wider
scandal after reports that state security forces had known of a plot
to kill him but failed to act.
Dink's self-confessed murderer, Ogun Samast, a jobless high-school
dropout who was 17 years old at the time, was sentenced to nearly 23
years in prison last July.
But while the court in Istanbul convicted Hayal, sentencing him to
life imprisonment, it acquitted more than a dozen other suspects,
provoking uproar in court and a furious response from the journalist's
family and lawyers.
Tuesday's court ruling said the killing of Dink -- who had angered
nationalists with his views on Turkish-Armenian history -- was not
planned in a wider conspiracy, as his supporters had alleged.
"Have they (prosecutors and judges) really probed conspiracy? I don't
think so," wrote Rusen Cakir in his column in daily Vatan.
"This government wants us to believe that Hrant Dink was killed ... by
a couple of young people who were bored," columnist Yasemin Congar
wrote in Taraf.
"And the government does not see that Dink's trial is a great
opportunity to clear the dark face of the state with the light of
the reality," she said.
Dink, 52, was a leading member of Turkey's tiny Armenian community
and had campaigned for reconciliation between Turks and Armenians
over their bloody history.
Nationalists however hated him for calling the massacres of Armenians
under Ottoman rule a genocide, a label that Turkey fiercely rejects.