Dink dreamt of Ergenekon trial

PanARMENIAN.Net - If Hrant Dink, murdered in 2007 in front of his newspaper office, were alive today, he would have been happy with the Ergenekon trials, Agos Editor Sarkis Seropyan said Monday.



"If Hrant were alive and saw the Ergenekon case, he would have been extremely happy," Seropyan said. "He would have supported the Ergenekon case much more than what we are able to do at Agos. He would not have been satisfied just by presenting the news related to Ergenekon."



"It was his dream that those people's masks would drop," Seropyan said, referring to alleged members of Ergenekon investigated by the Istanbul Public Prosecutor's Office, Today's Zaman reported.



The Ergenekon case in Turkey has been investigating a neo-nationalist gang believed to be the extension of a clandestine network of groups with members in the armed forces and accused of being behind a number of unsolved murders of journalists, academics, public-opinion leaders and writers.



Hrant Dink (September 15, 1954 - January 19, 2007) was a Turkish-Armenian journalist and columnist and editor-in-chief of Agos bilingual newspaper. Dink was best known for advocating Turkish-Armenian reconciliation and human and minority rights in Turkey. Charged under the notorious article 301 of the Turkish Criminal Code, Dink stood a trial for insulting Turkishness. After numerous death threats, Hrant Dink was assassinated in Istanbul in January 2007, by Ogun Samast, a 17-year old Turkish nationalist.



An investigation in the wake of the Dink assassination revealed that a group of ultranationalists was behind the murder. Strong evidence suggested that some members of the group had ties with the police department in northern Trabzon, the hometown of the plotters. Some gendarmes later confirmed that they had been tipped off about the plot to kill Dink before the murder was committed. Although three years have passed since Dink was killed, the investigation into his brutal murder has yielded no conclusion.