Yasin Hayal, accused of masterminding killing of editor, sentenced to life in prison but suspects cleared of terrorist links
A court in Istanbul has sentenced a man to life in prison for masterminding the killing of a leading Armenian journalist, but cleared all 19 suspects in the five-year-old case of acting under the orders of a terrorist organisation.
Hrant Dink, founder and editor-in-chief of the bilingual Armenian-Turkish newspaper Agos and despised by hardline Turkish nationalists, was shot on 19 January 2007 in front of his office in Istanbul, in a case that highlighted the threat faced by Armenians in Turkey.
Yasin Hayal was sentenced to an aggravated life sentence for soliciting the murder, but the court decided there was no evidence of a criminal organisation, and suspect Erhan Tuncel, who had been charged as a main instigator of the killing, was found not guilty. Tuncel was, however, sentenced to 10 years and six months' imprisonment for a separate crime. All other suspects were acquitted.
Ögün Samast, a radical nationalist who was 17 at the time of the murder, had been found guilty of shooting Dink and was sentenced to nearly 23 years in jail by a juvenile court in July 2011.
"We don't expect much anyway", Arzu Sun Becerik, one of the lawyers representing the Dink family, told the Guardian moments before the verdict was handed down by the court. "This verdict will be incomplete, because the investigation was not thoroughly done, because not all the facts have been taken into consideration."
In 2010, the European court of human rights found that Turkey had failed to properly investigate the role of state officials in the murder.
Numerous irregularities in the Dink murder investigation have been pointed out by lawyers and human rights groups since the trial began in July 2007, including deleted evidence, misinformation of the court by security and police officials, as well as "lost" security camera footage from cameras around the scene of the murder.
Lawyers and human rights groups were shocked by the court's decision to exclude all possibility of an organised crime.
Amnesty International's Turkey researcher, Andrew Gardner, told the Guardian: "There has been evidence since the time of the murder five years ago indicating that those on trial were working as part of a network, that state officials were complicit in the murder. This has been acknowledged by the Dink family lawyers, defendants in the case, the prosecutor and a state administrative investigation. Yet those individuals were not investigated effectively, they were not prosecuted..
"The court concluded that there was no organisation behind the murder, moving still further from the weight of evidence."
Lawyers representing the Dink family had repeatedly asked the court to summon several witnesses, among them senior police officers in Istanbul and Trabzon, but these requests were rejected. They also presented evidence to the court that the Istanbul police had been informed about a murder plot against Dink, but ignored the warnings.
"It is a damning indictment of justice in Turkey, sending the message that those in positions of power will be protected and human rights violations by state officials will go unpunished," said Gardner.
"The investigation, the prosecution and the verdict were largely irrelevant to achieving justice for Hrant Dink."
Fethiye Çetin, one of the family's lawyers, said after the verdict: "This is not over. What is over is this comedy. For us, the trial is just beginning."