Hrant Dink's murder case solution is a key to other political crimes: Fethiye Çetin

3 minute read

YEREVAN, SEPTEMBER 13, ARMENPRESS. The Turkish state makes effort to consign Hrant Dink's murder to oblivion, notwithstanding the Turkish society will never forget this crime and refuses to be involved in it. As reports "Armenpress", Fethiye Çetin, Hrant Dink's family lawyer,stated this in her new book titled "I am Ashamed: Trials on Hrant Dink's Murder Trial". Turkish Radikal periodical published some parts of the aforesaid books.

Fethiye Çetin emphasized that a man called Ramazan, who introduced himself as a worker of the Chief Department of the National Security Service of Eastern Anatolia region, called Çetin in March 2010 and said that he has important documents regarding Hrant Dink's murder. She got in touch with Ramazan via Skype, who showed her secret documents with the emblem of the National Intelligence Service on it. The unknown person told her that secret cryptograms are used in all the documents. Dink's lawyer tells how they managed to read Dink's name via Cyrillic alphabet in the aforesaid documents.

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 honour.

English Հայերեն