A court on Tuesday, Nov 26, refused to merge the case regarding the assassination of journalist Hrant Dink with a separate trial in which several officials from the Trabzon Gendarmerie Command are being tried on allegations of negligence of their duty, which led to the 2007 assassination.
Dink was murdered by a teenager in broad daylight outside the office of the Agos weekly where he was the editor-in-chief in January 2007. A separate trial was launched against several suspects, including Col. Ali Öz, who was the head of the Trabzon Gendarmerie Command at the time of the murder. Dink's shooter, Ogün Samast, traveled from Trabzon. Although the lower court did not find a crime organization behind Samast, evidence indicated that he and others who helped him plot the murder were in contact with the police department and gendarmerie officials of Trabzon.
The Trabzon 1st High Criminal Court is trying Col. Öz and the other suspects. The court earlier demanded that the trial be merged with the main Dink murder trial being heard at the Istanbul 14th High Criminal Court, which ruled on Tuesday that it was not necessary to merge the cases on the grounds that there are no “physical and legal links” between the two cases.
The 14th High Criminal Court earlier this year launched a new trial concerning the Dink case after the Supreme Court of Appeals in May overturned its ruling of Jan 17, 2012, in which it had dismissed the involvement of an organized criminal network in the murder.
In the latest development in the trial, Erhan Tuncel, a suspect who was previously acquitted of all charges related to the assassination, was arrested in late October.
