Ogьn Samast, suspected of murdering Hrant Dink, Editor-in-chief of Agos newspaper, said in the statement to Samsun police following his arrest, “I shot him after I said my Friday Prayer”. Samast admitted to murdering Dink in his first statement given in Samsun. This is what he reportedly said his statement: “I read the news on the internet. I saw that he said, ‘I’m from Turkey, but Turkish blood is dirty’. That is why I decided to kill him. I do not regret it.”
ME: Samast is a native of Trabzon, which immediately attracted the attention of Turkish investigators, because almost a year ago the city’s Catholic pastor, don Andrea Santoro, was gunned down by a 16-year old boy who said he had religious motives for the murder. Santoro had been active on behalf of Catholic prostitutes who had been trafficked into Turkey from Eastern Europe, which led some Turkish authorities to suspect he might have run afoul of criminal organizations involved in the trafficking.
The International Herald Tribune puts it all in perspective:
Samast’s age and origins in Trabzon are reminiscent of the killing last year of Andrea Santaro, a Catholic priest, also in Trabzon, by a 16-year-old youth.
Kazim Kolcuoglu, head of the Istanbul Bar Association, said that young people are sometimes used as assassins because they face lower penalties than adults convicted of the same crime.
In addition to Samast, six other men have been detained as suspected collaborators in the killing, and the police are working to decipher the links between them.
One of the suspects, Yasin Hayal, an alleged Islamic militant who learned to make bombs from Chechen militants at a camp in Azerbaijan and who served 11 months in jail for the bombing of a McDonalds restaurant in Trabzon in 2004, is suspected of masterminding the attacks on both Dink and Father Santaro.
Although early reports suggested that Samast was affiliated with an ultranationalist group called Nizam-i Alem, or World Order, the Istanbul head prosecutor said the teenager had no ties with any known militant organization.
ME AGAIN: The possible link to the Chechen “militant” (indeed) is of course tantalizing, and it will be interesting to see how vigorously the Turkish Government permits this case to be pursued. On the one hand, the government is firmly in the hands of increasingly radical Muslims, and they are hostile, to the verge of paranoia, with regard to anything Kurdish. On the other hand, Turkish judges are notoriously independent and for generations have rigidly — one might say obsessively — investigated extremists of all sorts and unhesitatingly sent them to the country’s celebrated prisons.
CORRECTION: The victim was Armenian, not Kurdish.
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