YEREVAN, OCTOBER 2, ARMENPRESS: Erhan Tuncel, the suspect of the murder of the editor-in-chief of the Armenian newspaper Agos Hrant Dink, has disappeared. As reported by Armenpress, quoting the Turkish Demokrathaber.net, it has been already for 14 days that nobody knows where Tuncel is.

In the framework of the trial on Hrant Dink’s murder case, the prosecutor informed that in July Erhan Tuncel was called to give evidences but the representatives of the security services  could not find him.

On September 17 the Istanbul 14th High Criminal Court began a review of the trial of the 2007 killing of the Armenian journalist Hrant Dink and made a decision to arrest Erhan Tuncel again for the participation in the assassination. Suspect Hacı Sarıoğlu and Yasin Hayal, who was convicted to life imprisonment, were present at the court hearings. The Court hearing has been canceled till December 3, 2013. Previously, the Dink family protested the judiciary system and said it would not attend the hearings. A written statement sent to press by the Dink family said the family will no longer attend the hearings to avoid being part of the “games played by the state mechanisms." Before the launch of the court hearings Hrant Dink's friends organized a protest action in front of the Court's building.

Hrant Dink was born on September 15, 1954. He was a Turkish-Armenian editor, journalist and columnist. As editor-in-chief of the bilingual Turkish-Armenian newspaper Agos, Dink was a prominent member of the Armenian minority in Turkey. Dink was best known for advocating Turkish-Armenian reconciliation and human and minority rights in Turkey; he was often critical of Turkey's denial of the Armenian Genocide. Hrant Dink was assassinated in Istanbul in January 2007, by Ogün Samast, a 17-year old Turkish nationalist. This was shortly after the premiere of the genocide documentary Screamers, in which he is interviewed about Turkish denial of the Armenian Genocide of 1915 and the case against him under Article 301. While Samast has since been taken into custody, photographs of the assassin flanked by smiling Turkish police and gendarmerie, posing with the killer side by side in front of the Turkish flag, have since surfaced. The photos created a scandal in Turkey, prompting a spate of investigations and the removal from office of those involved. At his funeral, two hundred thousand mourners marched in protest of the assassination, chanting "We are all Armenians" and "We are all Hrant Dink". Criticism of Article 301 became increasingly vocal after his death, leading to parliamentary proposals for repeal. The 2007–2008 academic year at the College of Europe was named in his honor.