Turkey shamed over murder of editor

Dink, 52, who gained notoriety after he was put on trial for saying that the mass killing of Armenians at the beginning of the 20th century was genocide, was shot and killed on Friday in broad daylight. He had received numerous threats before his murder, and wrote in his last newspaper column that he was so worried about attacks that his head swiveled like a pigeon’s as he moved around Istanbul.

Many Turkish papers ran a photograph of what was said to be the killer, a man wearing a coat and captured on a merchant’s security camera from behind. But the image revealed few details about the man’s appearance.

Turkey’s press was unanimous on Saturday morning in claiming as their own a man whose life in Turkey was largely defined by his being labelled a traitor and an enemy to his country.

“Hrant Dink is Turkey,” ran the headline in the daily Milliyet.

“The killer is a traitor to his nation,” Hurriyet said.

“The greatest betrayal,” Sabah newspaper said.

Turkish officials promised to expose the details of the killing, and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan went on national television at least three times to speak about the murder.

“The bullets aimed at Hrant Dink were shot into all of us,” he said on Saturday. Within hours of Dink’s murder, the prime minister had sent his interior minister and justice minister to Istanbul to lead the investigation. They remained there on Saturday.

The state-owned Anatolia news agency reported that Istanbul’s chief of police and other unit chiefs spent the night at police headquarters.

Most Turks assumed the shooting was a reaction to Dink’s public statements that the mass killings of Armenians around the time of World War I constituted genocide.

–BENJAMIN HARVEY