Five detained over links to Hrant Dink murder case

PanARMENIAN.Net - Police detained five people, including military personnel on Tuesday, July 26 in connection with an ongoing probe over the 2007 assassination of Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink, Daily Sabah reports citing a police source.

The detainees are four gendarmerie officers and the owner of a publishing house. Their identities were not revealed. Three officers were detained in Istanbul where Dink was murdered while one was detained in Trabzon, a northern city and hometown of Dink's assassin Ogün Samast.

Dink, the then editor-in-chief of the Armenian Agos weekly, was assassinated outside his Istanbul office on Jan. 19, 2007 in a murder initially attributed to nationalists disturbed by his outspokenness on the Armenian Genocide, a thorny issue for Turkey and especially nationalists. Samast, 17, was captured and sentenced to 23 years in prison, but further inquiry found several public and police officials linked to the Gülen Movement tried to cover up the case.

Several former senior police officers with ties to the Gülen Movement were arrested on charges of deliberate negligence for hiding tips about Samast and the person behind the murder plot who was a police informant.