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Armenian investigators are interrogating Valery Permyakov

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murderYEREVAN. – Armenian investigators are at the Russian military base in Gyumri and are interrogating Valery Permyakov, Russian serviceman who stands accused in murder of the Avetisyan family.

Spokesperson for the Armenian investigative committee Sona Truzyan confirmed reports for the Armenian News-NEWS.am. She also confirmed the reports that charges were brought against Permyakov.

As reported earlier, six members of the Avetisyan family—including a two-year-old girl—were shot dead, and a six-month-old baby—Seryozha Avetisyan—was wounded in their house in Gyumri on January 12; but the baby boy died in hospital on Monday.

Valery Permyakov, a serviceman of the 102nd Russian Military Base in the city, stands accused in this crime. Permyakov was apprehended by the Russian border guards near the Armenian-Turkish border on the same night, he was arrested on January 14, and he is held in custody at the Russian military base.

The soldier is charged under Russian law, with “the murder of more than two people” and “desertion with a service weapon.” The Investigative Committee of Armenia also has launched a criminal case on these murders.

The Prosecutor General’s Office of Armenia had stated that Valery Permyakov will face justice under Russian law, and this information had provoked a wave of protests in Armenia, especially in Gyumri and capital city Yerevan.

Turkey, Why will the Hrant Dink murder not be solved?

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By ORHAN KEMAL CENGİZ,

102After Hrant Dink was murdered, gendarmerie and police officers took turns taking photos with his murderer, Ogün Samast, at the offices of Samsun’s counterterrorism unit. They took these photos in front of a calendar on which Atatürk’s words, “The homeland cannot be abandoned,” appeared on a Turkish flag.

When Samast was taken into Bayrampaşa Prison after he was arrested, there was a very warm welcome for him. According to eyewitnesses, gendarmerie officers and prison guards lined up in the hall and they all applauded Samast.

After Samast was arrested, all of a sudden some young football fans started to wear white berets to show their sympathy with the murderer, who was wearing a white beret when he killed Hrant.

On Jan. 19, 2014, when the last commemoration of the Dink murder took place, some police officers were wearing white berets on the streets as the procession passed by even though the weather was 18 degrees Celsius.

Do you know who Turkey’s first ombudsman was? He was a member of the chamber of the criminal court that approved Hrant Dink’s sentence of insulting Turkishness, under Article 301 of the Constitution. I assume you can recall how Hrant was convicted. Some of his words were cherry-picked from a long series of articles he wrote mainly for diaspora Armenians. And these carefully tweezed words were represented as insults to Turkey. It was so obvious that his remarks had nothing to do with Turks; he was addressing Armenians.
Dink called on Armenians to get rid of their hatred towards Turks, and so on. Even though legal experts and even some prosecutors pointed out that his words said nothing to insult Turks, the appeals court “misunderstood” them.

When Hrant’s murderer was caught, he referred to these “misunderstood” words and said he had punished Hrant for insulting Turkishness.

Do you know who brought this case against Hrant? The complaint was made by a very famous lawyer who was conducting a psychological lynching campaign against religious minorities and intellectuals. Lawyer Kemal Kerinçsiz was later on arrested for his connection to the Ergenekon organization. However, he is free now, like all the Ergenekon suspects.

Before Hrant was killed, intelligence reports arrived at the İstanbul Police Department stating that Samast had traveled from Trabzon to İstanbul with the intention of killing Hrant. None of the officers acted on this intelligence.

You see, when we talk about Hrant Dink’s murder we are talking about a huge subject. There are hit men, provocateurs, people who aided and abetted murderers, officers who did nothing to prevent a murder they knew was coming and so on. At the same time, there is a culture and atmosphere of hatred towards Armenians that is fed by the denial of past atrocities.

Today, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) wants us to believe that they will solve this murder by arresting a few police officers, and somehow these police officers are said to be associated with the Gülen movement, with which this government has been in a huge war for quite some time.

They are the ones who chose this ombudsman, who freed the Ergenekon suspects and who promoted the former governor of İstanbul to the post of interior minister. And they are the ones who continue to deny what happened to Armenians in 1915.

And they want us to believe that they will solve this murder by making a few apologies!

Turkey, Police chief submits himself to police over Dink murder case

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ercan.thumbA police chief accused of negligence in the murder of Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink in 2007 has handed himself into the authorities in Ankara, the Hurriyet Daily News reports.

Ercan Demir was controversially assigned as police chief of the southeastern province of Şırnak on Dec. 30, despite accusations of negligence ahead of Dink’s murder when he was the intelligence police chief in Trabzon province, where the convicted killer and his accomplices came from. Dink’s family lawyer has accused him of failing to monitor the killers despite receiving notices about the planned assassination.

After being assigned to Şırnak, Demir was then recalled to his previous post at the General Security Directorate’s Information Technologies unit in Ankara, and he submitted himself to the police on Jan. 16, the day when a court issued an arrest warrant for his role in the Dink case. Demir is expected to testify in Istanbul.

On Jan. 13, an Istanbul court arrested Muhittin Zenit and Özkan Mumcu, two policemen involved in the inquiry into the killing of Dink.

Mourners are set to march in Istanbul to commemorate Dink on Jan. 19, on the 8th anniversary of his killing.

Dink was assassinated by Ogün Samast, who is serving a sentence of 22 years and 10 months in a high-security prison, on a busy street outside the office of the bilingual Turkish-Armenian weekly Agos in Istanbul’s Şişli district.

Yusuf Hayal and Erhan Tuncel are accused of convincing Samast to shoot Dink, in the Black Sea province of Trabzon.

Civil servants and institutions allegedly implicated in the murder of Dink should be investigated, the Constitutional Court ruled on July 17, 2014. The ruling became a milestone in the case that has been lingering since the killing in 2007.

Turkey, Dink lawyer: Gendarmerie knew about plot 6 months before murder

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202384_newsdetailHakan Bakırcıoğlu, a lawyer representing the family of slain Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, has claimed that the Trabzon Gendarmerie Command had known about the assassination plot against Dink six months before the murder took place.

The lawyer said the murder took place on Jan. 19, 2007, and the gendarmerie command was informed in July 2006 that the murder was going to take place. Dink, the editor-in-chief of the Agos newspaper, was assassinated in broad daylight outside his office.

Bakırcıoğlu also claimed that high-ranking gendarmerie commanders, such as Ali Öz and Metin Yıldız, had known that Yasin Hayal, one of the prime suspects in the ongoing Dink murder investigation, was planning to kill Dink.

Dink was shot and killed by an ultra-nationalist teenager. The hitman, Ogün Samast, and 18 others were brought to trial. Since then, the lawyers of the Dink family and the co-plaintiffs in the case have presented evidence indicating that Samast did not act alone.

In his interview with the Agos newspaper, the family’s lawyer also said that a report prepared at 9:30 p.m. on Jan. 20, 2007, at the Trabzon Gendarmerie Command included the exact features of the gun used by Samast. “However, Samast was captured at 11 p.m. [on Jan. 20, 2007] at the Samsun bus station and the murder weapon was seized at that time. This means that officials at the Trabzon Gendarmerie Command had known about the features of the gun even though the gun had not yet been seized,” he said.

The lawyer said the officials from the Trabzon Gendarmerie Command also knew that the suspects were determined to commit the murder. He said they arrived in İstanbul, inspected the road between Dink’s home and his office — the Agos newspaper building — and even drew sketches as to how they could go through with the assassination. He also said they were trying to obtain a gun to commit the murder.

Bakırcıoğlu asked about police chiefs allegedly linked with the Hizmet movement — which is inspired by the teachings of Turkish Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen. The chiefs testified to prosecutors as part of the Dink murder probe. In response to a question on whether the Dink investigation will be turned into a case used to try the Hizmet-affiliated police officers, Bakırcıoğlu said the prosecutors must assess the powers and duties of all the related public officials in the case, as well as their possible role in the murder, in order to arrive at the truth.

 

Lawyer: MİT, ex-intel chief did not protect Dink

 

Emphasizing that Dink was living in İstanbul, Bakırcıoğlu said: “His home and the Agos newspaper were both in İstanbul. He was shot during the day on one of the most crowded streets of İstanbul. … According to the Regulations on Protection Services, both the National Intelligence Organization [MİT] and former İstanbul Police Department Intelligence Bureau Chief Ahmet İlhan Güler were directly responsible for taking measures to protect Dink, and it is pretty clear that these responsibilities were not met.”

He also said the Dink murder was an organized assassination and that there is collective responsibility that needs to be taken. “A possible indictment to be prepared should include this [concept of] collective responsibility. An indictment prepared against one particular group or only certain officials will be deficient and misleading,” Bakırcıoğlu said.

There has been a recent attempt by some pro-government circles to put the responsibility for the Dink murder on police officers that they have labeled as being linked to the Hizmet movement. The movement has been subjected to a large-scale smear campaign by the government under claims of it being a “parallel state.” The campaign has been directed at the movement since Dec. 17, 2013, when a major corruption scandal implicating high-ranking state officials, including former Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and four former ministers, went public. The “parallel state” or “parallel structure” is a term used by Erdoğan to refer to the Hizmet movement, which he says was behind the corruption scandal.

Former Police Chief Ali Fuat Yılmazer and the former head of the National Police Department’s intelligence unit, Ramazan Akyürek, were among the police chiefs who testified to prosecutors as part of the Dink murder probe.

Turkey Cizre’s new police chief wanted as part of Dink murder case

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202445_newsdetailTurkish author and human rights activist Adalet Ağaoğlu (L) places carnations outside the Agos newspaper building during a ceremony to mark the sixth anniversary of the killing of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink in İstanbul in this 2012 file photo. (Photo: Reuters)
Newly appointed police chief of Turkey’s southeastern district of Cizre, where at least six people were killed in turmoil, is now wanted by the court as part of an investigation into the killing of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink.

Ercan Demir, who was appointed as Cizre’s district police chief earlier this year, was presiding over a district where tensions were running high. Both Interior Minister Efkan Ala and jailed leader of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) Abdullah Öcalan warned against “provocations” in the district.

Demir was questioned as a “suspect” as part of the investigation by prosecutors in İstanbul courthouse on Jan. 12, but a court released him pending trial. İstanbul prosecutors appealed the court’s decision and İstanbul’s Penal Court of Peace issued an arrest warrant for Demir on Friday on charges of “negliglence over the murder.”

Demir was serving as the Chief of the Intelligence Unit at Trabzon Police Department when Dink was gunned down.

Turkey Convenient murderer “Dink’s murder and the 3 Paris killings”

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e-uslu-b-1

EMRE USLU

e.uslu@todayszaman.com

The murder of Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink is the most scandalous, mysterious murder; it was committed during the term of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), and the assailants were apprehended. However, these assailants were being used at the time they committed the murder and are still being used.

Those who used them in the past to kill Dink, whom they saw as their enemy, are now using them to attack new enemies. One of the assailants hurled accusations at police officers as soon as he was released from prison. Those who gave him the gun to slay Dink have apparently given him a petition of complaint against several police officers and have sent him to the prosecutor.

There are odd details in the statement that the murderer gave to the prosecutor. For instance, he gave the prosecutor the badge numbers of five police officers, claiming that these police officers had looked up the telephone number of Yasin Hayal, who was allegedly involved in the murder of Dink, in the police department’s computer system five minutes after the murder. How he got these numbers is questionable, because he was in prison for the last few years.

Apparently his masters who sent him to attack Christian missionaries and Armenians — whom they stigmatized as enemies — are preparing to send him to attack their new enemy, the Hizmet movement. Or do you believe that a murderer who has been silent out of fear for many years in prison learned the badge numbers of five police officers in his dreams and decided to be an informant?

Let me tell you why this “convenient” murderer has been ordered to talk: The government seeks to curry favor with the leftists and liberals in the fight it has been waging against the Hizmet movement. If it can manage to put the blame for Dink’s murder on those police officers whom it portrays as being affiliated with the movement, the government will be able to criminalize the movement and alienate the liberals who support the movement…

I have reiterated this countless times. The ruling AKP, prosecutors and Nedim Şener, who wrote a book about Dink’s murder, were all unwilling to investigate the murder in depth and with the intention of finding out the mastermind behind the murder. Everything was being done to cover up the connection of the murder to the state.

If you really want to find the real perpetrators of Dink’s murder, you must focus on the powers that are behind the murderers and not on the murderers themselves. But you won’t do this because those powers don’t want you to do so. There is a single document the court must investigate if it is really willing to investigate Dink’s murder and the killing of several Christian missionaries in Malatya: the decisions taken during the National Security Council (MGK) meetings held in 2004 about the activities of Christian missionaries and the Armenian issue.

Why did the Religious Affairs Directorate decide to take action against the missionary activities and sponsor a book about them? Why did certain media outlets start to churn out news stories and TV programs as though Turkey was snowed under with Christian minorities?

I know you won’t search for the answer because you have always been the state’s prosecutor or judge. But let me write it down: 2005 was the 90th anniversary of the Armenian tragedy. The state took certain measures at home and abroad in connection with it.

The sponsorship of a book about Christian missionaries by the Religious Affairs Directorate was one of these measures. Under the same project, media outlets kicked off campaigns to engineer public opinion and several experts on the Armenian issue mushroomed out of nowhere to make appearances on several TV channels.

Şener’s book about Dink’s murder is also part of those measures, as it serves to cover up the mastermind behind the murder. One day, the truth will come out…

Dink was sacrificed as a result of those measures. An independent court would not waste time on the claims made by a convenient murderer, but instead investigate who gave the order to that murderer.

Some may say “Dink was murdered in 2006,” but I would like to draw attention to the killing of three Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) members in Paris in 2013. The state made a decision in 2012 to act against the PKK leaders. In the wake of the Uludere tragedy — in which 34 civilians were mistaken for terrorists and killed by military airstrikes in Şırnak’s Uludere district in 2011 due to false intelligence — the state adopted a new concept, but old “measures” were kept in force. The state initiated peace talks with the PKK, but at the same time, it also killed off the PKK leaders. This is what we get from the media reports that appeared in the wake of the Paris killings.

As a result of such measures, Murat Karayılan, the PKK military wing’s number one, was captured in Iran. A very high-ranking intelligence officer had said: “We cannot go and capture Karayılan using the intelligence from the US while the state was negotiating with the PKK. Therefore, we gave the information to the Iranians, who caught him.”

This is the way the state operates. It worked in the same manner in Dink’s murder and with the Paris killings. My intention is not to protect the police or military officers who should be held responsible for the murder. My suggestion is that all police and military officers who were in office at that time, politicians and those who took those decisions at the MGK should be tried by a real and independent court and not with fake investigations, fake indictments and fake courts. This could be the Constitutional Court or an international court, but it must be a real court to punish the real perpetrators. But Turkey cannot do this because everyone knows the real perpetrators. This murder cannot be resolved but is instead covered up by fake courts, fake indictments, expedient murderers and fake books.

Dink’s murder was one of the results of the measures the state took in 2005, i.e., on the 90th anniversary of the Armenian issue. 2015 is the 100th anniversary of this issue and Turkey is taking new measures. Perhaps, the first of these measures is to make that convenient murderer talk…

Hrant Dink murder case deepens with new testimonies

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Ayşegül Usta ISTANBUL

n_75413_1The list of suspects in the murder case of Hrant Dink, a Turkish-Armenian journalist killed in 2007 in Istanbul, has been broadened, with the court listening to more high-ranking officials amid a move to merge the case of the convicted shooter with that of the alleged instigators.

Ergun Güngör, the Istanbul deputy governor at the time, testified on Dec. 9 at an Istanbul court as a suspect accused of negligence.

A day earlier, Ahmet İlhan Güler, the then-chief of police intelligence, testified. The then-Trabzon police chief Reşat Altay has also been called to testify, while former Istanbul police chief Celalettin Cerrah, along with seven others, are expected to appear in court soon.

A Bakırköy district court in Istanbul canceled the dismissal of charges against officials on June 6, handing the case to the Istanbul chief public prosecutor’s office.  

Another court decision ruled to combine convicted assailant Ogün Samast’s case at the juvenile court with a case at the fifth high criminal court, in which Yusuf Hayal and Erhan Tuncel are accused of convincing Samast in the Black Sea province of Trabzon to shoot Dink in Istanbul.

“I will speak up,” Samast, who was 17 years old when he shot Dink in front of the latter’s office on Jan. 19, 2007, was quoted as saying in daily Taraf late last month. His words came in a letter sent to the prosecutor in charge of the investigation.

Civil servants and institutions allegedly implicated in the murder of Dink should be investigated, the Constitutional Court stated in a detailed ruling on the case on Nov. 12.

December/09/2014

Turkey, Former police chief was called to testify in Dink trial

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198198_newsdetailFormer police chief Ali Fuat Yılmazer was called to testify as part of an investigation into the killing of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink as a suspect. report Zaman

Prosecutor Yusuf Hakkı Doğan is supervising the investigation and summoned Yılmazer, who was on duty at İstanbul Police Intelligence Unit. Yılmazer previously said he was on duty abroad when the killing took place and denied any responsibility. The prosecutor reportedly also called Ogün Samast, the hit man in the murder of Dink, who was fatally shot outside the Agos weekly office in 2007, as a witness. Former İstanbul Police Chief Celalettin Cerrah will also be summoned as part of the investigation.

Yılmazer is currently behind bars on wiretapping charges.

Turkey: Dink murder trial takes new turn as court to focus on ‘criminal organization’ claims

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ISTANBUL

n_73684_1The Friends of Hrant Dink Association issued a public statement in front of Istanbul’s Çağlayan courthouse on Oct. 30. AA Photo

The trial into the murder of the Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink has taken a significant turn after the court in Istanbul overseeing the case announced that it will focus on the “criminal organization” allegations against suspects, a move that lawyers representing the victim’s family had demanded since the start of the retrial. Report Hurriyet

Istanbul’s 5th High Criminal Court ruled on Oct. 30 in line with a previous Supreme Court of Appeals decision that overturned the verdict of the initial trial process, on the grounds that it overlooked investigating the murder of the renowned editor-in-chief of the weekly Agos in the context of a planned and organized crime.

According to the decision, the suspects will be retried on charges of being a member of a criminal organization.

The Supreme Court of Appeals had also overturned the acquittals of top suspects including Yasin Hayal, who was charged with being the instigator of the assassination and the “leader of a terrorist organization.” Hayal and other suspects, such as Erhan Tuncel and Ersin Yolcu, are also being retried.

The triggerman Ogün Samast, who was sentenced to 22 years by a children’s court, is also likely to be tried on new charges, as the court ruled to associate his case with the main murder trial. Samast was only 17-years-old when he shot Dink in front of his office in Istanbul on Jan. 19, 2007.

However, lawyers have also been wary of the Supreme Court verdict, as it defined the aim of the murder as a “political act,” rather than an act of terrorism, as they have claimed that an armed terror organization was behind the killing. For a murder to be considered a “terrorist act,” it would have to be committed with a clear aim against the state of the public order, according to the Turkish Penal Code.

Lawyers previously said they would try to prove that the activities of the organization went beyond the assassination of Dink.

The ruling comes only a few days after the Justice Ministry cleared the path for investigations into nine civil servants, including senior police officers occupying key posts at the time of the murder, such as the former Istanbul police chief Celalettin Cerrah. The officers had been accused of negligence and threatening Dink before his death.

The Friends of Hrant Dink Association hailed the decision in a statement issued in front of the Istanbul courthouse Oct. 30, while demanding that the civil servants be charged with “murder.”

Dink’s lawyers have long been demanded that the investigation should focus on the “real web of connections” that led to Dink’s murder, while expressing few expectations from the retrial.

The matter was even subject to a review by Turkey’s Constitutional Court, which ruled that the case had not been efficiently investigated and the rights of Dink’s family were violated.

October/30/2014

Turkey 9 public officials face investigation for negligence in Dink murder

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195252_newsdetailFormer İstanbul Police Chief Celalettin Cerrah is among the nine public officials who face an investigation on a charge of negligence in the murder of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink. (Photo: Cihan) report TodayZaman

Nine public officials, including former İstanbul Deputy Governor Ergun Güngör and former İstanbul Police Chief Celalettin Cerrah, are facing an investigation on a charge of negligence in the murder of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, who was assassinated in broad daylight outside the office of his Agos newspaper on Jan. 17, 2007.

The lawyers of Hrant Dink’s family had filed a complaint in 2011 with the İstanbul Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office against Güngör; Cerrah; the former chief of the İstanbul Police Department’s intelligence unit, Ahmet İlhan Güngör; and six other police officers on the grounds that those public officials were negligent in preventing Dink’s murder.

After the complaint, the chief public prosecutor’s office applied to the İstanbul Governor’s Office to ask for permission to investigate those listed public officials. However, the governor’s office did not give this permission to the prosecutor’s office. After the governor’s office’s decision, the prosecutors decided not to prosecute.

However, the Dink family filed an appeal with the Bakırköy 8th High Criminal Court to annul the İstanbul Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office’s decision not to prosecute.

On May 21 of this year, the Bakırköy court decided to cancel the prosecutor’s office’s decision not to prosecute.

After the decision of the high criminal court, the İstanbul Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office applied to the Justice Ministry, requesting that the Supreme Court of Appeals’ Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office appeal the Bakırköy 8th High Criminal Court’s verdict.

The Justice Ministry rejected this request, opening the way for an investigation into the public officials against whom the Dink family originally filed the criminal complaint.

This recent decision has paved the way for the judgment of the public officials on the charge of negligence in the murder of Turkish-Armenian journalist Dink.

Dink was shot and killed by an ultra-nationalist teenager seven years ago. The hit man, Ogün Samast, and 18 others were brought to trial. During the process, the lawyers for the Dink family and the co-plaintiffs in the case presented evidence indicating that Samast did not act alone. Another suspect, Yasin Hayal, was given life in prison for inciting Samast to murder. However, Erhan Tuncel, who worked as an informant for the Trabzon Police Department and was the man accused of initiating the effort to have Dink murdered, was found not guilty of the murder.