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Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, slain in January, was officially acquitted in two court cases concluded yesterday at an İstanbul court.
Three other defendants who were facing charges of “insulting Turkishness” and “attempting to influence the judiciary” were also acquitted, though a third similar case opened at a later date will continue.
The two court cases were sent back to a criminal court in the Şişli district after the Court of Appeals ordered a retrial. Retrial of the cases was originally scheduled to begin in February but it was postponed to yesterday, June 14, following Dink’s Jan. 19 assassination by a teenage gunman in downtown İstanbul. Dink, who was the editor of the bilingual Agos daily, was facing charges of insulting Turkishness under the infamous Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code and of attempting to influence the judiciary’s functioning under Article 288 in those two cases.
Two of the defendants, Dink’s son Arat Dink, and Agos editor Serkis Seropyan, appeared in the court for a retrial session of the cases. Lawyers for the defendants demanded acquittal, saying elements of the crime were not in place. The court agreed and acquitted all the defendants in the case.
A similar case in which Dink and other defendants face the same charges of insulting Turkishness was postponed to a later date to allow defense lawyers to prepare their plea.
Dink had become a hated figure for ultranationalists for his comments over an alleged Armenian genocide at the hands of the late Ottoman Empire. He called for reconciliation between Turks and Armenians and was a sharp critic of the Armenian diaspora for its uncompromising stance against Turkey.
Before his death, Dink had complained that the charges of “insulting Turkishness” against him made him a target of nationalist anger.


In the article by the AGBU entitled: "ARMENIAN BLOGS HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY: IS ANYONE LISTENING?" the author writes about the Armenian blogs:
...a crop of Armenian blogs is emerging to suggest that the blogosphere (as the blog world is called) promises to make a growing impact in the future. From politics to personal stories, blogs are as varied as their authors. While some strive for professionalism and others flounder in navel-gazing, the energy derived from their diversity is what makes blogs some of the best sources of up-to-date information today.
Agence France Presse -- English
June 14, 2007 Thursday 5:28 PM GMTProsecutors called Thursday for a prison sentence of up to three years for the son of a murdered Turkish-Armenian journalist for reproducing an interview his father gave confirming the Armenian genocide.
The public affairs ministry accuses Arat Dink, editor of the bilingual Turkish-Armenian weekly Agos, and his colleague Serikis Seropyan, of "denigrating the Turkish national identity".
In a July 2006 edition of Agos, they reproduced an interview Hrant Dink gave to a news agency in which he declared that the massacre of Armenians committed between 1915 and 1917 in southeastern Anatolia constituted a genocide.
"Of course I say this is a genocide. Because the result itself identifies what it is and gives it a name. You can see that a people who have been living on these lands for 4,000 years have disappeared.
This is self-explanatory," Hrant Dink, then editor of Agos, had said.
At Thursday's hearing Dink accused judges of contributing to his father's death by making him a target thanks to their high-profile judicial proceedings.
"I think it is primitive, absurd and dangerous to consider as an insult to Turkish identity the recognition of a historic event as a genocide," he said, quoted by the Anatolia news agency.
Prosecutors said he should be sentenced to between six months and three years in jail.
Hrant Dink, 52, was himself branded a "traitor" by nationalists for urging open debate on the massacres of Armenians under the Ottoman Empire which he labelled as genocide.
He was last year given a six-month suspended sentence for insulting "Turkishness" and faced more charges before being shot dead in January outside the offices of Agos, where he was editor at the time.
The massacre remains a major bone of contention between Armenia and
Turkey and two countries and they have not established diplomatic
ties since Armenia broke away from the Soviet Union in 1991.
Ogun Samast, 17, has confessed to shooting Dink. He and 18 other accomplices will be tried from the beginning of July over the murder, believed to have been committed with ultra-nationalist motives.
(Photolur photo)
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