ISTANBUL (Daily News)–Two suspects accused of conspiring to murder Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink acknowledged that the gun presented before them during the 11th trial of the case on Monday was the weapon used in the murder, news agencies reported.
The gun used to kill Dink was brought to the courtroom while the culprits were removed from the courtroom one by one so that they could be shown the gun.
“I was going to kill a man. I was not going to a wedding ceremony,” said Ogun Samast, the confessed murderer of Dink, when he saw the gun. Later he took the gun and looked at it. Samast said the gun he used in the murder had had a problem in its safety lock and that the gun he was holding in the courthouse had a similar problem. “It was this gun,” he said, according to the Anatolia news agency. Yasin Hayal, who is a suspected co-conspirator, also said, “I acknowledge 100 percent that this is the gun.”
Meanwhile, the attorneys for Dink’s family demanded the court bring the files of two other important ongoing cases they alleged to be connected to the Dink case. The first file is for the Ergenekon gang, a group currently on trial for allegedly plotting to topple the government by creating turmoil in society. The second file, meanwhile, concerns the Zirve publishing house case, in which three missionaries were killed in the southeastern city of Malatya.
Fethiye Cetin, the attorney for the Dink family, said that in a report commissioned by Parliament’s human rights body about the murder, Ramazan Akyurek, the intelligence chief of the Black Sea province of Trabzon at the time of the murder, had said that he left Trabzon on May 8, 2006, and began work in Ankara on May 9, 2006. According to him, Dink was murdered because of national sensitivities; he said he already had the intelligence about the murder from intelligence units.
Cetin alleged that public authorities hid Dink’s murder at every stage. Cetin also said it is evident that missionaries, Christians, Jews, Kurds and Alevis were targeted, according to the briefings Ergenekon case suspect Sevgi Erenerol gave to the General Staff in 2006.
