 HRANT DINK SHOT
DEAD IN BOLIS
Jan 19 (Reuters) - A Turkish-Armenian editor, who had been convicted of insulting Turkey‘s identity over his comments on Armenians, was shot dead outside his newspaper office in Istanbul on Friday.
Turkish broadcaster NTV said Hrant Dink, a controversial writer and journalist, was shot by an unknown assailant as he left his newspaper Agos around 1300 GMT in central Istanbul.
A colleague of Dink’s confirmed he had died. Police released no further information.
Last year Turkey‘s appeals court upheld a six-month suspended jail sentence against Dink, a Turkish-born Armenian, for referring in an article to an Armenian nationalist idea of ethnic purity without Turkish blood.
The court said the comments went against an article of Turkey‘s revised penal code which lets prosecutors pursue cases against writers and scholars for “insulting Turkish identity.”
Dink was one of dozens of writers who have been charged under laws against insulting Turkishness, particularly over issues related to an alleged genocide of Armenians by Ottoman Turks during World War One.
Turkey denies genocide was committed.
The government has promised to revise the much criticised article of the penal code. The European Union has repeatedly called on Ankara to change the law.
Dink was editor-in-of chief of the bilingual Turkish and Armenian weekly Agos.
www dot bbc dot co dot uk - The Turkish-Armenian writer and journalist Hrant Dink has been shot dead, Turkish media report. Dink, the high-profile editor of newspaper Agos, was shot three times outside its offices in Istanbul, the paper said. Dink was one of the writers who had been prosecuted under Turkey‘s strict laws against “insulting Turkishness”.
He was given a six-month suspended sentence in October 2005 after writing about the Armenian “genocide” of 1915.
Hundreds of thousands of Armenians died at the time, in what many Armenians say was a systematic massacre at the hands of the Ottoman Turks.
Turkey denies any genocide, saying the deaths were a part of World War I.
Dink, 53, had received threats from nationalists who viewed him as a traitor, the Associated Press news agency reported.
He was a public figure in Turkey – one o f its most prominent Armenian voices.
He once gave an interview with the Associated Press in which he cried w
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