Five Turks charged with murder of editor Dink

ISTANBUL/ANKARA, Jan 25 (Reuters) Five people have been charged with involvement in the killing of Turkish-Armenian editor Hrant Dink, Turkish media today reported.

Police blew up a suspicious package outside parliament which carried a note from the ultranationalist Turkish Revenge Brigade (TIT) calling for two key suspects, including the suspected assassin, to be released.

Istanbul's chief prosecutor Aykut Cengiz Engin has charged Ogun Samast, an unemployed 17-year-old from the Black Sea coast, with premeditated murder and membership of an armed group.

Four others have been charged with forming an armed organisation and incitement to murder.

Samast, who is reported to have been close to an ultranationalist group in his home town Trabzon, has admitted to shooting Dink as he left his newspaper Agos in Istanbul last Friday.

The murder brought 100,000 mourners onto Istanbul's streets for Dink's funeral on Tuesday and reignited debate about hardline nationalism in a country seeking European Union membership.

''From the quality and the nature of the crimes attributed to the suspects it is clear the result emerges that they formed an armed group,'' Engin told reporters late yesterday in comments reported by the NTV Web site.

Engin said the suspects had been remanded in custody and prosecutors would now prepare an indictment against the suspects.

NATIONALISM TIT, a shadowy group which has claimed responsibility for a series of deadly attacks, threatened in a note on the device placed outside parliament that real explosions would follow unless Samast and Yasin Hayal were released.

Hayal, a known nationalist militant, has admitted to inciting his friend Samast to kill Dink, the police said.

Hayal served 11 months in jail for the 2004 bombing of a McDonald's restaurant in Trabzon.

According to police, prosecutors and Samast's own lawyer, he has confessed to killing Dink for ''insulting'' Turks in his writings and statements on the massacres of Armenians during World War One a highly sensitive issue in Turkey.

Dink, who worked for reconciliation between Christian Armenians and Muslim Turks, had been prosecuted for his views on the massacres of Armenians by Ottoman Turks in 1915.

He was among intellectuals, including Nobel Literature Prize winner Orhan Pamuk, who have been prosecuted under laws restricting freedom of expression in Turkey.

Turkey denies claims by Armenia and other countries that 1.5 million Armenians died in a systematic genocide at Turkish hands, saying large numbers of both Christian Armenians and Muslim Turks perished during the breakup of the Ottoman Empire.

REUTERS SY RK2300