Ergenekon planned to attack Agos office after Dink assassination

PanARMENIAN.Net - A suspect in an ongoing investigation into a gang accused of plotting to overthrow the government has said that the group, known as Ergenekon, had plans to attack the office of the Armenian language biweekly Agos, shortly after Agos’ former editor-in-chief Hrant Dink was assassinated.

Today’s Zaman reported that Ergenekon suspect Bedirhan Şinal testified in a cross-examination on Thursday that the Ergenekon gang, including Şinal himself, had been planning to attack Agos’s offices after Armenian-Turkish journalist Dink was assassinated in January 2007.

Imprisoned after attacking the Cumhuriyet daily headquarters in İstanbul’s Şişli district with Molotov cocktails in 2008, Şinal claimed they were preparing to attack other Agos employees in 2008 following Dink’s murder. However, Şinal stressed that they had to give up the plan because of the extensive security measures that were taken in the neighborhood after Dink’s murder, which was carried out in front of Agos’s building.

In his testimony, Şinal added that people who allegedly incited him to murder had not kept their promises. He stated in his former testimony that there were some the people urging him on who had offered some money to persuade him to attack Cumhuriyet headquarters and that he had claimed that the people inciting him had promised to bail him out of jail in three or four months, but stressed that he was still in prison after four years. When Şinal was asked who the people inciting him were, he said that they were a priest and some businessmen from İstanbul whose names he said he did not know. Şinal added that he was allegedly introduced to these men by policemen.

Dink, the editor-in-chief of Armenian-Turkish newspaper Agos, was gunned down outside his office in İstanbul in broad daylight on Jan. 19, 2007. The hitman, Ogün Samast, was captured roughly one day after the murder. Other suspects, including Yasin Hayal and Erhan Tuncel, were aprehended in the following days on charges of soliciting Samast for Dink’s murder. The murder shocked Turkey, and the ensuing trial became mired in controversy with Dink’s family and human rights activists arguing that links between suspects in the case and the real masterminds of the murder, suspected to be in the military and police force, were not sufficiently investigated.