The alleged murderer of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink has a new explanation for why he killed the writer: he was driven to commit the crime by headlines in the Turkish media. From Bianet:
At the second hearing of triggerman suspect Ogün Samast at the Juvenile High Criminal Court, Samast said that he was not guilty of killing journalist Hrant Dink but the headlines that called him a traitor. "Where are they now?" Samast asked.
Ogün Samast is the prime suspect of the murder of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink in 2007. Dink was editor-in-chief of the Armenian Agos newspaper at the time. The hearing at the Juvenile Court in Gülhane (Istanbul) on Tuesday (5 April) was held under broad security measures in the court house and its environment.
Samast presented a letter he had written to the court at the Tuesday hearing. He wrote, "I am not guilty. Guilty are the headlines that showed Dink as a traitor. I removed the rubbish in front of me; now the ones who wrote those headlines should think. Where are they now, the ones who brought me that far? I would not even know the Agos newspaper. Today, I would sit down with Hrant Dink and talk to him".
Although Samast, who was 18 at the time of the killing, is the main suspect in the 2007 murder of Dink, it is charged that elements in Turkey's police and security forces were complicit in the act. Dink and his writings were frequent targets of Turkey's nationalist press and the journalist had also been convicted by a court for "insulting Turkishness."