On April 28, the legal representatives of the Dink family submitted a petition to the Istanbul Public Prosecutor’s Office requesting the appointment of prosecutors that would thoroughly investigate the Hrant Dink murder process. The lawyers also requested that the appointed prosecutors allocate most of their time to this investigation.
“The prosecutor or prosecutors who will be appointed to this investigation should be released from other duties…because the acts we mentioned in our petition cover a period of more than three years, the number of individuals and institutions involved is quite high, and thus require intensified concentration and time,” said attorney Fethiye Cetin. “This is why we requested from the office that prosecutors mainly focus on this investigation to conduct it timely and thoroughly, as one cannot expect satisfactory work from them with their existing workload.”
The petition lays out the course of murder in phases of “preparation,” “creating public opinion,” “action,” “manipulation,” and “destroying evidence” after the murder. “It is imperative to collect all the evidence, bringing loose pieces together to see the whole picture to reveal this extremely professional structure, to take all the clues into consideration to decipher this organization, to find the material facts, and to conduct an effective investigation,” the lawyers said.
The elements of the “preparation” phase is described in the petition as news made by the media to turn public opinion against Hrant Dink, and official complaints made against him with identical petitions and indictments prepared against him without legal grounds. The members of the National Intelligence Service (MIT), the intelligence services of the gendermarie, and the police are mentioned as being part of this phase, as they did not take any preventative measures although they had been closely following the course and triggerman at the time.
The petition describes in detail the acts of all phases, naming the murder itself as the “acting” phase; the efforts to draw the public attention away from the murder through official statements and the leak of details of the investigation to the media as the “manipulation” phase; and finally spoiling and destroying the evidence and preparing forged documents as the last phase.
Attached is the full petition.
This is one more example of progress. Let’s hope it continues.