Pair guilty of 'insulting Turkey'

[frigidmagi]

BBC

The son of murdered Turkish-Armenian writer Hrant Dink has been found guilty of insulting "Turkishness", along with another newspaper editor.

Arat Dink and Serkis Seropyan were convicted after printing Dink's claims that the killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turks from 1915 was genocide.

The verdict came a day after a US congressional committee backed a bill labelling the killings as genocide.

Turkish leaders reacted angrily, but the decision was welcomed by Armenians.

The non-binding US vote, passed by 27 to 21 votes by members of the congressional House Foreign Affairs Committee, is the first step towards holding a vote in the House of Representatives.

Outspoken

Arat Dink and Mr Seropyan, who both work as editors at Agos, a leading bilingual Turkish and Armenian weekly newspaper, were given one-year suspended sentences for printing comments made by Hrant Dink during an interview.

Dink, the editor-in-chief of the newspaper, was one of Turkey's most prominent Armenian voices.

Hrant Dink, in November 2006
Hrant Dink was one of Turkey's most prominent Armenian voices

He was shot dead outside his Istanbul office in January 2007.

At the time he was appealing against a prior conviction for the same offence - insulting the Turkish identity under Article 301 of the country's penal code.

Turkey faces ongoing international pressure to scrap the offence, under which dozens of writers who have been charged, often for articles dealing with killings of Kurds or Ottoman Armenians.

Hundreds of thousands of Armenians died in 1915 and the following years at the hands of Ottoman Turks.

Armenians have campaigned for the killings to be described internationally as genocide. More than a dozen countries, various international bodies and many Western historians have done so.

Turkey admits that many Armenians were killed but it denies any genocide, saying the deaths were a part of World War I.

Turkey and neighbouring Armenia still have no official relations.