January 22, 2007
Teenager Admits to Killing Writer, But Has 'No Regrets'
>true crime
Turkish police have arrested a 17-year-old on suspicion of murdering Hrant Dink, Turkey's most prominent citizen of Armenian descent, who was shot dead in cold blood outside his newspaper office on Friday.
Ogun Samast, from the Black Sea town of Trabzon, told police: "I read on the internet that he [Dink] said, 'I am from Turkey but Turkish blood is dirty' and I decided to kill him ... I do not regret this."
The youth...was arrested as he was travelling home by bus, became the chief suspect after his father told police that he recognised him from footage captured by a security camera. Police said he was still carrying the murder weapon.
...Dink saw it all coming. In an article published in his newspaper the day before he died, he wrote: "In the corridors of the law courts, fascists were attacking me with racist curses. Hundreds of threats via phone calls, e-mails and letters were pouring down, increasing in number day by day ... It is obvious that those wishing to single me out and render me weak and defenceless have achieved their goal. My computer is full of messages full of rage and threats."
Yet he dared to hope that he would face them down. "I may see myself as frightened as a pigeon," he wrote, "but I know that in this country people do not touch pigeons. Pigeons can live in cities, even in crowds. A little scared, perhaps, but free..."
The bitter irony is that the Dink never said "Turkish blood is dirty". In the article for which he was convicted, [last year on a charge of "insulting Turkishness"] he had exhorted Armenians to "purify their blood of hatred for the Turks". In court Dink maintained that it was "a call for peace", but nationalists bent on punishing him for his prominence insisted that he was guilty.
Minors are often employed as hit-men in Turkey because they are interrogated by public prosecutors instead of police and minors' courts tend to hand out milder sentences.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey's Prime Minister, condemned Dink's murder, saying "a bullet has been fired at Turkish democracy". After the arrests, he said: "We're going to continue investigations with the same determination."
But it was Mr Erdogan's government that passed the law making "insulting Turkishness" a criminal offence, and it has yet to repeal it despite vowing to do so. Dozens of writers and intellectuals have been accused under the law, including the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk, but Dink was the only person to have been convicted.
http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/article2174987.ece
By Peter Popham Published: 22 January 2007
~To kill for one's people, nation, country, race, tribe, gang or crowd! It's something alright, that power... but not everything?
(I may've been bred to be hunted and killed by people like this teenager. )
[photo not from the Independent]
Posted by Stubbornson at January 22, 2007 02:05 PM