ISTANBUL — Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink was commemorated on Saturday on the 6th anniversary of his murder.
A large crowd attended a ceremony held outside the offices of his Agos weekly in Istanbul, carrying banners that read “We are all Hrant, we are all Armenians” and laying carnations and lighting candles at the very spot Dink was shot dead on January 19, 2007.
“We are here today with our grief and honor. We are here today for justice and righteousness,” his wife, Rakel Dink told the crowd.
American linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky also attended the commemoration.
Chomsky was in Turkey to participate in “the 2013 Hrant Dink Human Rights and Freedom of Expression” conference hosted by Istanbul’s Bogazici University.
A juvenile court in Istanbul sentenced in July 2011 the gunman in Dink’s murder, Ogun Samast, to nearly 23 years in prison.
A separate Istanbul court sentenced Yasin Hayal, another suspect in the slaying, to life in prison for instigating the murder but it stopped short of convicting him on the charges of acting under orders from a wider criminal network which had been suspected of involving high level state officials, police and military officers.
The court acquitted Erhan Tuncel, a second suspected instigator, of charges of being involved in the suspected criminal network.
The European Court of Human Rights ruled in September 2010 that Turkey had failed to protect Dink’s right to life.
Last week a chief prosecutor asked for the annulment of the Dink verdict arguing that the murder involved “an organized attempt.”
“The murder was not just an ordinary killing of a person. The act had the intention to destroy the unity of the Turkish state and create chaos in the society. Dink’s murder was an organized assassination,” the chief prosecutor from the Turkish Court of Appeals, said in a petition for re-trial of the suspects.
