More disappointing decisions in murder trial as Turkey turns a deaf ear to criticism

During the 15th hearing yesterday in the trial in Istanbul of newspaper editor Hrant Dink’s alleged killers, the court rejected the Dink family’s request for the murder to be reenacted in the presence of alleged hitman Ogün Samast at the spot where Dink was gunned down, outside the office of his Turkish-Armenian weekly Agos in the Istanbul district of Sisli. In a surprise development, the court decided that Samast should be tried separately before a special court for minors on the grounds that he was only 17 at the time of Dink’s murder, on 17 January 2007. Samast’s case file was accordingly sent to the Istanbul minor’s court in Sultanahmet (on the city’s European bank), where his trial will not resume until the start of next year. The court also rejected a proposal to combine the main Istanbul case with a parallel case in Trabzon, the northeastern city where Samast and most of the alleged murder conspirators are from. Seven Trabzon gendarmes are charged with failing to react to the plans to kill Dink, of which they had prior knowledge. Reporters Without Borders is very disappointed by these decisions, especially as they come after the European Court of Human Rights ruled last month that Turkey should compensate the Dink family for failing to prevent his murder. The Tübitak Scientific Research Institute has meanwhile still not responded to the Dink family’s request on 10 May for an analysis of the video recorded by the security camera of Akbank, a bank located next to Agos, during the fatal shooting. The family wants to know how the recording came to be erased and whether it can be restored. The delays, obstacles and setbacks still dogging this trial seem to indicate a continuing desire to shed as little light as possible on a case of national importance. Turkey seems not to have learned the lesson of the recent European Court of Human Rights ruling. It is this kind of behaviour that has led to its fall to 138th position in the latest Reporters Without Borders press freedom index. During yesterday’s hearing, the court said it wanted to hear testimony from 10 other people including Ergün Cagatay. According to one of the leading defendants, Yasin Hayal, Cagatay had planned to attack Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. At the same time, the Istanbul prosecutor’s office must now decided whether a statement made by Erhan Özen, a former collaborator with the controversial Gendarmerie Intelligence Organization (JITEM), should be accepted in the Dink trial. Özen claims that, during the period he collaborated with JITEM (1997 to 2005), the murders of Dink (January 2007), Italian Catholic priest Andrea Santoro (February 2006) and three protestant missionaries in the eastern city of Malatya (April 2007) were all part of the actions being planned by JITEM. On 14 September, the European Court of Human Rights ordered the Turkish state to pay Dink’s family 133,595 euros in compensation and legal costs for failing to act on the information it had about the plots to kill Dink. The court ruled unanimously that Turkey violated articles 2, 10 and 13 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The next hearing in the Dink murder trial has been set for 2 February.