ISTANBUL (Radikal) — Turkey’s Interior Ministry has denied any responsibility in Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink’s assassination, claiming in a failed appeal to the Council of State that paying compensation to the man’s family would lead to “unjustified enrichment.”
The 10th Istanbul Administrative Court ordered the Interior Ministry on October 27, 2010, to pay 100,000 liras in damages to Hosrof and Yervant Dink, Hrant Dink’s two brothers, due to the gross dereliction of duty allegedly committed by the ministry in Dink’s assassination. The court said the ministry had not prevented the murder and had failed to protect Dink despite the fact that it was in possession of sufficient evidence that there was a plot against the journalist’s life.
The Interior Ministry then appealed to the Council of State to not enforce the judgment. The Council of State, however, denied the ministry’s appeals. The Interior Ministry also said the lawsuit against it should have been filed at a court of first instance, rather than at an administrative court; it also referred to Dink’s assassination as a “nefarious attack” in its appeal to the Council of State.
Dink was the editor of Agos and Turkey’s best-known Armenian voice abroad. He was shot in broad daylight as he left his office in Istanbul’s Shishli district in 2007.
