Former police intel chief arrested in Dink murder case

ISTANBUL – Anadolu Agency

A former Istanbul police intelligence chief was arrested late May 28 in the case of the murder of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink.

Ali Fuat Yılmazer, who was the Istanbul police intelligence chief when Dink was murdered in 2007, was arrested after being interrogated for a second time in the killing of Dink. 

Istanbul’s 5th Penal Court ordered May 28 the arrest of Yılmazer on charges of “aiding and abetting premeditated murder,” and “forming a criminal organization.”

Ogün Samast assassinated Dink in broad daylight on a busy street outside of the office of bilingual Turkish-Armenian weekly Agos in Istanbul’s Şişli district on Jan. 19, 2007. Samast, who was 17 years old at the time, is serving his sentence of 22 years and 10 months in a high-security F-type prison in Kandıra, Kocaeli. 

Yılmazer, who had first testified as a suspect in December 2014, has been under arrest since July 23, 2014, as part of an illegal wiretapping case into the “parallel state,” allegedly led by U.S.-based Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen. 

The court’s decision stated Yılmazer had formed a secret unit named “C-5,” in which only some police captains and their deputies were allowed to work, inside the police department. It stated that the C-5 unit had started working on Nov. 23, 2012, after the approval of the Interior Ministry. In the decision, the unit is alleged to have looked into the cases of the Dink murder, the Father Santoro murder, the killing of a German and two Turks in the Zirve Publishing House and the coup plot cases of Ergenekon and Balyoz (Sledgehammer).