A Courageous Armenian Voice is Silenced

The newspaper editor, 52, was gunned down in the Turkish city on Friday, metres from his offices.

Dink wrote controversial articles about the mass killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turks during World War I.

Mourners carrying placards reading "We are all Armenians" paused and applauded as they passed the place he was shot.

Many roads have been shut to allow the mourners to proceed to an Armenian Orthodox Church five miles (8km) across the city.

The BBC's Sarah Rainsford in Istanbul says the mourners wish to express their sense of solidarity and horror at the murder.

Many, she says, are already beginning to consider Dink a martyr.

Turkish prosecutors said the teenager suspected of the murder of Dink, shot three times outside his newspaper's offices, had confessed.

Suspects held

Ogun Samast was arrested after he was identified by his father from CCTV images taken near the murder scene.

He was held in the Black Sea port of Samsun together with six other suspects, before being returned to Istanbul for further questioning.

One of the suspects was named as Yasin Hayal, a friend of Mr Samast, who has spent 11 months in jail for a 2004 bomb attack outside a McDonald's restaurant in Trabzon.

Turkey's Hurriyet newspaper reported on Monday that during police questioning Mr Hayal said that he had given Mr Samast, aged 16 or 17, the gun and the money.

Investigators say that so far they have found no links between Mr Samast and any known political group.

High security

Turkish officials have said the funeral will be held amid high police presence.

"We have cancelled all leave for police and we will have an adequate force in place," Istanbul governor Muammer Guler said on Monday.

Armenian government officials and religious leaders as well as some members of Turkey's Armenian diaspora have been invited to attend the funeral.

Officials from Yerevan will make the trip despite the fact that Armenia and Turkey have no diplomatic relations.

Dink will be buried at Istanbul's Armenian cemetery after a ceremony a religious service and a ceremony outside the Agos office.

'Genocide'

Dink's murder shocked Turkey and Prime Minister Erdogan vowed repeatedly that his killer would be caught.

Journalists and politicians in Turkey have expressed outrage at the killing, which many described as a political assassination, while the US, EU, France, and several human rights groups also voiced shock and condemnation.

Dink had received multiple death threats from nationalists because of his views on the mass killings of Armenians during the final days of the Ottoman Empire.

He was convicted in October 2005 for writing about the Armenian "genocide" in 1915, a claim denied by the authorities in Ankara.

The issue is a sensitive subject in both Armenia and Turkey. Many Armenians have campaigned for the killings to be recognised internationally as genocide.

Turkey admits that many Armenians were killed but it denies any genocide, saying the deaths happened during widespread fighting in World War I.

A Courageous Armenian Voice is Silenced

The newspaper editor, 53, was gunned down in the Turkish city on Friday, metres from his offices.

Dink wrote controversial articles about the mass killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turks during World War I.

Mourners carrying placards reading "We are all Armenians" paused and applauded as they passed where he was shot.

From there they walked five miles (8km) to an Armenian Orthodox church, where the funeral service was led by the patriarch. Much of the city centre was closed to traffic.

Priests chanted and doves were released as Dink was buried at Istanbul's Armenian cemetery.Priests chanted and doves were released as Dink was buried at Istanbul's Armenian cemetery.

Agence France Presse-June 14, 2007 Thursday - Prosecutors called Thursday for a prison sentence of up to three years for the son of a murdered Turkish-Armenian journalist for reproducing an interview his father gave confirming the Armenian genocide. The public affairs ministry accuses Arat Dink, editor of the bilingual Turkish-Armenian weekly Agos, and his colleague Serikis Seropyan, of "denigrating the Turkish national identity".

In a July 2006 edition of Agos, they reproduced an interview Hrant Dink gave to a news agency in which he declared that the massacre of Armenians committed between 1915 and 1917 in southeastern Anatolia constituted a genocide. "Of course I say this is a genocide. Because the result itself identifies what it is and gives it a name. You can see that a people who have been living on these lands for 4,000 years have disappeared. This is self-explanatory," Hrant Dink, then editor of Agos, had said.
At Thursday's hearing Dink accused judges of contributing to his father's death by making him a target thanks to their high-profile judicial proceedings. "I think it is primitive, absurd and dangerous to consider as an insult to Turkish identity the recognition of a historic event as a genocide," he said, quoted by the Anatolia news agency.

     Prosecutors said he should be sentenced to between six months and three years in jail. Hrant Dink, 52, was himself branded a "traitor" by nationalists for urging open debate on the massacres of Armenians under the Ottoman Empire which he labelled as genocide. He was last year given a six-month suspended sentence for insulting "Turkishness" and faced more charges before being shot dead in January outside the offices of Agos, where he was editor at the time.
    The massacre remains a major bone of contention between Armenia and Turkey and two countries and they have not established diplomatic ties since Armenia broke away from the Soviet Union in 1991.
       Ogun Samast, 17, has confessed to shooting Dink. He and 18 other accomplices will be tried from the beginning of July over the murder, believed to have been committed with ultra-nationalist motives.