A Turkish court Monday handed a jail term of nearly 23 years to the self-confessed murderer of prominent ethnic Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, gunned down in broad daylight in 2007.

Tweet

The juvenile court initially condemned Ogun Samast to life, but reduced the sentence to 21-and-a-half years on grounds he was under age at the time of the murder, and gave him an additional 16 months for possession of an unlicensed weapon.

Samast was a 17-year-old jobless high-school dropout when he shot Dink on January 19, 2007, on a busy street outside the offices of the journalist's bilingual Agos newspaper in downtown Istanbul.

Shockwaves
The assassination sent shockwaves through Turkey and grew into a scandal after it emerged that the security forces knew of a plot to kill Dink, but failed to act.

The journalist was already receiving death threats from hardline nationalists.

A leading member of Turkey's tiny Armenian community, Dink, 52, campaigned for reconciliation between Turks and Armenians over their bloody history.

Nationalists however hated him for calling the massacres of Armenians under Ottoman rule genocide, a label that Turkey fiercely rejects.

Speaking after the hearing, a lawyer for Dink's family expressed satisafaction with the verdict.

"The court imposed a sentence that is close to the heaviest possible punishment," Fethiye Cetin told reporters.

"The sentence is very important in terms of preventing the repetition of such acts that threaten our co-habitation," she said.

Samast had admitted to shooting Dink because he was an "enemy of the Turks."

In his final words Monday, he put the blame on his poor education and the influence of media criticism of Dink.

"How did I hear about Agos, about Hrant Dink, about him being a traitor? It was all in the columns of Hurriyet and Vatan," he said, referring to two of Turkey's popular newspapers.

Six months before the murder, Dink was given a suspended six-month sentence for "insulting Turkishness" over an article he wrote about the collective memory of the Armenian massacres during World War I.

Samast remains on trial in a separate case on charges of belonging to a terrorist organisation, along with 18 suspected accomplices.

Prosecutors say police received intelligence as early as 2006 of a plot to kill Dink being organised in the Black Sea port of Trabzon, home to Samast and several other defendants.

The European Court of Human Rights
The European Court of Human Rights ruled last year that the Turkish authorities had failed to take adequate measures to protect Dink.

In June, a colonel and five subordinates who held key posts in Trabzon when a group of local youths hatched the assassination plot were given jail terms of four to six months for negligence.

The case is seen as a test for Ankara's resolve to eliminate the "deep state" - a term used to describe security forces acting outside the law to preserve what they consider Turkey's best interests.

The Dink family's legal team suspect the gunman was encouraged by elements of the "deep state" but their efforts to put more officials on trial have failed.

They have accused police of withholding and destroying evidence to cover up the murder, including footage from a bank security camera in the street where the journalist was gunned down.

Dink had won many hearts in Turkey with his message of peace and more than 100,000 people marched at his funeral.

Source: AFA