Epress.am News from Armenia
The Turkish Presidency’s State Supervisory Council (DDK) recommended yesterday that top police and gendarmerie officials be prosecuted in the main Hrant Dink murder case due to their alleged negligence before and after the journalist’s 2007 killing.
The suggestion amounts to a non-binding call to the judiciary to restart the Dink murder trial and places the suspected public servants next to the gunman.
The DDK, which outlined its recommendations in a report released yesterday, also touched on the need to reform the secret services in order to have the ability to prevent the murders of key personalities or social unrest like the bloody incidents that took place in Sivas in 1993 or in Kahramanmaraş in 1978. “Hrant Dink’s murder must be evaluated as a whole, starting from when Dink was singled out as a target and threatened,” the 650-page report said.
Dink, a Turkish-Armenian journalist and editor-in-chief of weekly Agos, was gunned down by an ultranationalist teenager outside the offices of his newspaper in broad daylight in İstanbul on Jan. 19, 2007. The investigation into his murder stalled when the suspected perpetrator and his accomplices were put on trial as those who masterminded the plot to kill him have yet to be exposed and punished. In the face of growing calls from the public and a European Court of Human Rights ruling that found Turkey guilty of failing to protect Dink’s right to life and of carrying out a thorough investigation into the officers who failed to take the necessary measures in light of early warnings and tips about the plot to kill Dink, Turkish President Abdullah Gül ordered the DDK to investigate the Dink murder last year.
The investigation that followed Dink’s death revealed that the police had been tipped off to the plans for the murder of the journalist; however, the police failed to intervene. The summary of the DDK report said the sequence of negligent acts by public officials was not examined as a whole and no investigation was launched separately into different state institutions.
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 report noted that as a result of this failure, the seriousness of the actions of public officials in the run up to the murder has not been understood and the link between their actions and the murder could not be established, leading to the failure of all of the investigations into public officials. Speaking to the station NTV, Justice and Development Party (AK Party) Deputy Chair Hüseyin Çelik agreed that mistakes had been made throughout the investigation of the Dink murder.
“We know that many mistakes were made since the beginning in the run up to murder, which began in Trabzon. The detection of these mistakes by the DDK is a significant step to see the functioning of the law. The final ruling in the Dink case will be appealed. When the DDK findings are conveyed to the relevant authorities, there will be investigations again,” he said.
The DDK report is non-binding and will have no official effect on the proceedings. However, the Dink family has already appealed and the report sends an “advisory” message to the Supreme Court of Appeals for the annulment of the lower court’s decision.
A majority of the suspects, including the hitman, are from Trabzon, where police say they had informed the İstanbul police about the plot to kill Dink on more than one occasion. The report’s findings regarding the negligence of the Trabzon Police Department have been omitted from the file put on the web. This section includes the assessment of six important criticisms leveled against the verdict.
Noting that senior public servants had a direct affect in not protecting Dink before the murder even though they had received crucial intelligence regarding the impending danger, the report suggested that these civil servants should also be prosecuted.
Compiled from Today’s Zaman and Hurriyet Daily News reports.