Armenian-Turkish Journalist Shot Dead

An Armenian-Turkish journalist who had spoken out about the mass killing of Armenians at the start of the 20th century was shot dead today outside his office, police said.

Hrant Dink, a 53-year-old Turkish citizen of Armenian descent, was shot a number of times by an unknown gunman at the entrance of the bilingual Turkish-Armenian Agos newspaper, which he edited, in Istanbul, TV reports said.

"Dink was shot in front of the office and he is dead," an employee of the weekly paper was quoted as telling the AFP news agency.

Television footage showed the journalist's body lying face down, draped with a white sheet, on the pavement in front of the newspaper office's entrance.

The NTV channel said four empty shell casings were found on the ground, and that Mr Dink had been killed by two bullets to the head.

Police said they were searching for a teenager wearing a white hat and a denim jacket, believed to be the killer. His motive was unknown.

However, Mr Dink had repeatedly received threats from Turkish nationalists, who viewed him as a traitor for describing the killing of Armenians between 1915 and 1917 as genocide.

The issue is bitterly disputed between Turkey and neighbouring Armenia, with the two having no diplomatic relations.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish prime minister, said he had assigned a group of leading justice ministry officials to lead the hunt for the killer.

"Once again, dark hands have chosen our country and spilled blood in Istanbul to achieve their dark goals," he told a news conference. "We are investigating all aspects of this crime."

As the editor of Agos, Mr Dink was one of Turkey's most prominent Armenian voices. In October 2005, he was given a six-month suspended jail sentence for writing a newspaper article that addressed the mass killing of Ottoman Armenians.

Mr Dink had been convicted of trying to influence the judiciary after Agos ran stories criticizing a law making it a crime to insult Turkey, the Turkish government or the Turkish national character.

The conviction was rare even in a country where trials of journalists, academics and writers have become common. Most of the cases - including that of Nobel Prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk - were either dropped on a technicality or resulted in acquittals.

The EU had raised the issue of Mr Dink's treatment as a possible barrier to Turkey's EU entry.

Armenia wants Turkey and other nations to officially label the killing of hundreds of thousands of Armenians under the Ottoman Empire as genocide. Turkey says the dead were victims of the first world war.

In the 1970s and 1980s, tensions were further inflamed when dozens of Turkish diplomats were killed by Armenian assassins.