Hrant Dink family demands new investigation

PanARMENIAN.Net - The family of Hrant Dink, the Turkish-Armenian journalist who was assassinated outside his newspaper’s office in 2007, but most of whose murderers were allowed to walk free following a court ruling last month, have demanded a new investigation into various individuals in the police and gendarmerie forces who seem to be implicated according to a probe conducted by the State Audit Institution (DDK), Today’s Zaman reported.

The İstanbul 14th High Criminal Court announced the ruling on the Dink murder in January, saying there was no involvement of an organized criminal network, which lawyers for the Dink family say is hardly convincing.

However, a report on the case by the DDK, which also investigated the murder under orders from President Abdullah Gül, tells a different story. Released in February of this year, the DDK report has revealed that mistakes were made in the investigation of public officials who were suspected of having acted negligently in their efforts to prevent the murder.

The investigation into Dink’s death revealed that the police had been tipped off about the plans to murder the journalist; however, the police failed to intervene. The DDK report said the sequence of negligent acts by public officials was not examined as a whole and no independent investigations were launched into the different state institutions involved. It said the method adopted during the investigation of public officials led to the failure of not investigating all allegations about public officials as a whole.

The Dink family petitioned the Bakırköy Prosecutor’s Office on Thursday, calling for the start of a new investigation into the role of officials in the run-up to the murder. “The DDK report has obviously approached the matter meticulously and using an approach more comprehensive than any other investigation that has been carried out before, resulting in new findings and evidence,” the petition said, noting the judiciary should consider the new evidence presented in the DDK report. The Dink family called for a thorough search of all gendarmerie records, including confidential archives, regarding the tip-offs that came at the time Dink’s assassination was being plotted by a group of young men in the Black Sea city of Trabzon.

The court convicted Yasin Hayal, a major suspect in the killing of Turkish-Armenian journalist Dink, of instigating a murder and sentenced him to life in prison. Another suspected instigator, Erhan Tuncel, was acquitted by the court. Tuncel and some of the other suspects have proven connections with the Trabzon Police Department and some gendarmerie officials in the city.