19 January 2016•Update: 19 January 2016
ISTANBUL
Over 1,000 people gathered Tuesday in Istanbul to commemorate the anniversary of the death of prominent journalist Hrant Dink.
Dink, who was considered one of the most prominent Armenian voices in the country, was assassinated in broad daylight in front of his office in Istanbul on Jan. 19, 2007.
The crowd of people marched from Istanbul’s Taksim Square to the location of the Agos newspaper offices in the Sisli district, where Dink was shot dead nine years ago.
Chanting, "We are all Hrant, we are all Armenians", the crowd carried banners in Turkish, Kurdish, and Armenian.
Police had closed certain roads leading to Taksim Square and the Sisli.
Dink, 52, was one of the founders of the bilingual Turkish-Armenian weekly Agos.
Dink's assassin, Ogun Samast, 17 years old at the time of the murder, is serving a 23-year prison sentence. Samast, who was tried and convicted in 2011, said he killed Dink for insulting "Turkishness".
Turkey's Constitutional Court ruled in July 2014 that the murder case had been an "ineffective investigation".
"We have been closely following the case," the crowd shouted, implying that it had been going on for too long.
Last year, another case was launched regarding the alleged negligence by certain officers in Dink’s murder case. Certain former senior police officers were questioned and others arrested in an ongoing court case.
For instance, an Istanbul court also ordered the arrest of a Turkish police chief, Ercan Demir, who was charged with causing the death of Hrant Dink by "deliberate negligence".
Demir was a police chief in Turkey’s Trabzon province when Dink was murdered in Istanbul. The murderer, Ogun Samast, reportedly came from Trabzon.
In December 2015, an indictment linked to the 2007 murder called for the prosecution of 26 people on charges of "establishing an armed organization" and "neglecting their duties".
The indictment, which had previously been twice rejected due to an apparent lack of information, called for life sentences for Ramazan Akyurek, a former head of Turkey's police intelligence, as well as Cosgun Cakar and Ali Fuat Yilmazer, both senior officers in police intelligence.
All three are accused of intentionally causing Dink’s death and forming an "armed organization".
An upcoming hearing on March 4 may see Dink’s murderer, Samast, and others involved in the murder being called before the court.
