Top Court upholds Turkish-Armenian journalist Dink killer’s sentence

ANKARA - Anatolia News Agency

Under the Turkish Penal Code, Samast will not serve the 22 years and 10 months to which he was sentenced, but will be released after 10 years, in 2022. AA photo

Turkey’s Supreme Court of Appeals upheld the prison sentence of late Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink’s murderer Ogün Samast on March 21.

A juvenile court in Istanbul had sentenced Samast to 22 years and 10 months in prison last July for the “planned murder of Hrant Dink” and for carrying an “unregistered gun.” However, under the Turkish Penal Code, Samast will not serve the 22 years and 10 months to which he was sentenced, but will be released after completing two thirds of his service.

As Samast has already been in jail for the past five years, he will be released from prison by 2022.
The juvenile court initially condemned Ogün Samast to life, but reduced the sentence to 21-and-a-half years, on the grounds that he was underage at the time of the murder, before giving him an additional 16 months for possession of an unlicensed weapon. The court also decreased Samast’s 600 Turkish Lira judicial fine to 300 liras.

Samast was convicted of killing Dink, a Turkish Armenian journalist and the editor-in-chief of the weekly newspaper Agos, who was murdered in front of his newspaper’s office in 2007. Samast defended himself saying he had had a poor education and committed the murder under the influence of others.