A 17-year-old Turkish boy, held as the prime suspect in the killing of journalist Hrant Dink, one of Turkey's most prominent ethnic Armenians, has confessed to the murder, a prosecutor told Anatolia news agency Sunday.
The suspect, Ogun Samast, a jobless secondary school graduate reportedly involved in nationalist groupings, was detained overnight at a bus terminal in the Black Sea port city of Samsun, while he was returning from Istanbul to his nearby hometown of Trabzon.
He was still carrying the gun he allegedly used to shoot Dink, 53, three times in the head and the neck outside the office of the bilingual Turkish-Armenian Agos weekly in downtown Istanbul Friday afternoon, officials said.
His father tipped off the police about his son after police released pictures of the youth caught on the security camera of a bank near the scene of the murder.
"He admitted he committed the murder" in his preliminary interrogation in Samsun before he was flown to Istanbul, Samsun's chief prosecutor Ahmet Gokcinar told Anatolia.
"I shot him after saying the Friday prayers. I'm not sorry," the CNN Turk news channel quoted the suspect as saying in his testimony. "I read news on the Internet. He said 'I'm from Turkey but Turkish blood is dirty' and that's why I decided to kill him."
Six other people, suspected of being linked to the assassination, were detained in Trabzon and four of them were also flown to Istanbul Sunday.
Pointing to Samast's young age, Dink's lawyer raised the possibility that he might be only a hitman manipulated by others behind the scene. "The boy might have pulled the trigger, but the authorities should find those who are behind him," Erdal Dogan told the Aksam newspaper. "The state should not just say 'this boy did it' and shut up."
His sentiment was echoed in a frontpage headline in the liberal daily Radikal: "They got a child to kill Dink."
Among the detainees flown from Trabzon to Istanbul was a friend of Samast, named as Yasin Hayal, who spent 11 months in jail for a 2004 bomb blast outside a McDonalds restaurant in Trabzon, in which six people were injured, media reports said. Samast said in his initial testimony that Hayal encouraged him to kill Dink and gave him the gun that he used in the shooting, the mass-circulation Milliyet newspaper reported.
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