Turkish Writer and Journalist Killed

A Turkish journalist and writer who had written and spoken out about the alleged genocide of Armenians during the First World War was shot dead in Instabul yesterday.

Hrant Dink who was also prosecuted under the country's notorious 301 law o Anti Turkishness was killed yesterday afternoon

According to a report in Today's Indy,

It was not only a frightful blow to Turkey's surviving Armenian community but a shattering reversal to Turkey's hope of joining the European Union, a visionary proposal already endangered by the country's broken relations with Cyprus and its refusal to acknowledge the genocide for what it was: the deliberate mass killing of an entire race of Christian people - 1,500,000 in all - by the country's Ottoman Turkish government in 1915. Winston Churchill was among the first to call it a holocaust but to this day, the Turkish authorities deny such a definition, ignoring documents which Turkey's own historians have unearthed to prove the government's genocidal intent.

From Media Guardian

As the editor of Agos, Mr Dink was one of Turkey's most prominent Armenian voices. In October 2005, he was given a six-month suspended jail sentence for writing a newspaper article that addressed the mass killing of Ottoman Armenians.
Mr Dink had been convicted of trying to influence the judiciary after Agos ran stories criticizing a law making it a crime to insult Turkey, the Turkish government or the Turkish national character.