Hrant Dink murder trial – where are the state’s records?

Following the 14th hearing in the trial of the men accused of the January 2007 murder of Hrant Dink, a journalist of Armenian origin, Reporters Without Borders reiterates its support for the Dink family and its lawyers in their continuing battle for a fair trial. During the latest hearing, held on 12 July, the Dink family’s lawyers filed a request for the prosecution of several senior officials and leading nationalists, including: - Ergun Güngör, former deputy governor of Istanbul - Özer Yilmaz, former deputy chief of the of the National Intelligence Agency (MIT) in the Istanbul region - Levent Temiz, former head of a Turkish nationalist group called “Ülkü Ocaklari” (Idealist Centre) - Erhan Tmuroglu, who is charged in connection with an alleged conspiracy by an ultra-nationalist network called Ergenekon. The court transferred the request to the Istanbul prosecutor’s office. The Dink family’s lawyers also filed a complaint against Kemal Kerinçsiz, an ultranationalist lawyer and former head of Büyük Hukukçular Birligi (the Union of Turkish lawyers), an organisation that is responsible for most of the prosecutions based on article 301 of the criminal code outlawing any “insult” against the Turkish nation, people or institutions. Currently in prison for being part of the alleged Ergenekon conspiracy, Kerinçsiz helped turn Dink into a target for Turkish ultranationalists by submitting repeated requests to the judicial authorities for him to be prosecuted, Reporters Without Borders is exasperated by the lack of cooperation between the different branches of the Turkish state, some of which keep failing to provide the court with crucial documents in their possession, thereby considerably holding back the trial’s ability to progress. During the latest hearing, the alleged instigator of the murder, Erhan Tuncel, repeated that, prior to the murder, he had four phone conversations with a police officer, Mehmet Ayhan, about the plan to kill Dink. The last of these was in December 2006. “Each time I clearly said that Yasin Hayal had decided to kill Dink with a gun outside his newspaper.” But the court has never obtained information about the date, time and duration of these calls, and the numbers called, which would allow it to identify them precisely and to submit a request to the High Council for Telecommunications (TIB) for the recordings of these calls. This means that, for the past three years, neither the police, nor the intelligence services in Ankara nor the TIB have cooperated with the judicial authorities by providing them with any evidence whatsoever of the phone calls that allegedly took place between the alleged instigator and this police officer. A policeman serving a 15-year jail sentence in connection with another murder testified to the court during the latest hearing that he worked in his father’s Internet café on the morning of Dink’s murder and saw the alleged shooter, Ogün Samast, there. He said Samast spent nearly three hours in the café, called Kritik Café. It is located on Safak Street, where Samast is known to have fled after allegedly shooting Dink. The witness also testified that, after the murder, police came to the café to collect data from the computer Samast had used. They said they were not able to recover anything from it. Reporters Without Borders is also amazed that the court refused to hear testimony from former police intelligence chief Sabri Uzun, who has clearly said that a report about the threats to Dink was archived instead of being sent to him. “If I had been informed of the existence of this report, Hrant Dink would still be alive today,” he said. Reporters Without Borders will pay close attention to the next hearing, which is scheduled for 25 October.