The murder of Hrant Dink: A Turkish court denies a wider conspiracy

The journalist Hrant Dink was no stranger to sinister e-mails and anonymous death threats. Turkish of Armenian descent, he was a well-known and outspoken advocate for peace between the two bitterly estranged nations. That won him few friends among rabid Turkish nationalists who hated Dink because he openly said the killings of hundreds of thousands of Armenians in the early 20th century was genocide — a term Turkey rejects.

But things rapidly got worse for Dink in January 2007. Sentenced by a court for "insulting Turkishness," he was vilified by mainstream newspapers and called into a meeting at the Istanbul governor's office to be warned that he had gone too far. "I am now a target," he wrote. "My soul," he wrote shortly after the meeting, "has the skittishness of a dove ... a bit frightened, but free."

The day those words were published, Dink was gunned down outside his newspaper's office, shot in the head three times by Ogun Samast, then 17, who was later apprehended in Trabzon, a city on the Black Sea coast, where patriotism and machismo run high. Leaked pictures showed police and army officers apparently giving the young man a hero's welcome: they posed, smiling, against the backdrop of a Turkish flag.

According to rights activists, the case file is riddled with contradictions, misplaced evidence, ATM-camera footage that mysteriously disappeared and dozens of other suspect details. Even more striking is that since the trial began in 2007, several individuals believed to be involved in Dink's assassination have been arrested in connection with Ergenekon, an alleged ultra-nationalist network that sought to topple the government. Yet lawyers have been unable to question them about their connection to the Dink case. "This shows us that the boundaries between who is immune from prosecution or not are predrawn, and you can only go after someone when the state deems it appropriate, which is not the case for Hrant Dink's murder," said the Istanbul-based Human Rights Platform in a special report.

Turkey's President Abdullah Gul promised last year to personally pursue the case — "a clean Turkey," he said, "was a personal responsibility." He ordered state auditors to look into the allegations, although little has come of that initiative, and his reaction to Tuesday's verdict remains to be seen. Dink's family — his wife, son and daughter — will likely appeal the ruling.