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Turkish Video Praising Dink Murder Sparks Investigation


dpa
Prosecutors have launched an investigation into a song and video broadcast on the Youtube video-sharing website that praises the January murder of the Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, the English-language Today's Zaman newspaper reported on Tuesday.

Prosecutors are looking into whether the folk singer Ismail Turut, lyricist Ozan Arif or the unknown person who created the video could be charged with inciting hatred.

The video posted on Youtube is a montage of images which Today's Zaman described as being "ultra-nationalistic, religious, anti- American and anti-Israel" and is set to the music of Turut's song "Don't make any plans." The song contains lyrics such as "if a person betrays the country, he is finished off" and shows images of the body of Dink after he was shot dead outside his newspaper's offices in Istanbul in January.

The video, which also shows images of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Nobel Prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk and captured Kurdish Workers Party leader Abdullah Ocalan allegedly accusing them of betraying Turkey, has since been removed from the Youtube site.

Dink was a prominent member of Turkey's Armenian minority who campaigned for tolerance but was hated by Turkish nationalists for describing the massacres of Armenians in the last years of the Ottoman Empire as genocide. Editor of the Armenian-language newspaper Agos, Dink was shot dead by a 17-year-old nationalist outside his office in Istanbul in a murder that shocked the nation.

The Human Rights Association and the Association of Human Rights and Solidarity for Oppressed Peoples have announced that they will also bring cases against Turut and Arif.
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