ISTANBUL. – Erhan Tuncel, the Turkish Gendarmerie intelligence agent who was charged with but acquitted of prompting the murder of Hrant Dink—the founder and former chief editor of Istanbul’s Agos Armenian bilingual weekly, who was gunned down in 2007 in front of his office building—, was relocated to Istanbul’s Bakirkoy district, where Dink’s family members reside.   

Hrant Dink’s brother Khosrov stated that this event seemed to be a message for him from the state, reports NTV News Agency of Turkey.  

In his turn, Erhan Tuncel gave an interview to Posta daily and accused Yasin Hayal for Hrant Dink’s murder, and claimed that Hayal should not be disregarded that much.

He also asserted that his grandmother is not Armenian, but, during the deportation years, his family had adopted the Armenian daughter of its neighbor.  

“Simply, my aunt on my mother’s side is Armenian,” Tuncel said.        

On January 17, the Turkish court found Yasin Hayal guilty of planning and organizing Hrant Dink’s murder, and sentenced him to life in prison. Erhan Tuncel, on the other hand, was found not guilty of prompting Dink’s murder, and, instead, he was sentenced to 10 years and 6 months for an explosion in a McDonald’s restaurant. But taking into account that Tuncel was already incarcerated for that amount of time, the court ruled his release.

The court also found the nineteen other defendants not guilty of being members of a terrorist organization.

And earlier, Hrant Dink’s actual killer, Ogun Samast, was sentenced to a total of 22 years and 10 months for Dink’s murder and for bearing illegal arms. But Samast was tried at a juvenile court, since he was a minor at the time of the murder.