Turkish police ‘treated alleged killer as a hero’

TURKISH media published photographs yesterday of police posing with a teenager charged with killing an ethnic Armenian journalist. Newspapers denounced the officers for treating the suspect as a “hero”.

The pictures show 17-year-old nationalist Ogun Samast holding out a Turkish flag and posing with officers, some in uniform. Behind Samast, a poster with another Turkish flag carries the words of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the revered founder of modern Turkey: “The nation’s land is sacred. It cannot be left to fate.”

Samast is charged with the January 19 killing of Hrant Dink, 52, an ethnic Armenian journalist, who angered Turkish nationalists with repeated assertions that the mass killings of Armenians around the time of World War I were genocide.