Arat Dink, the son of Hrant Dink, who was assassinated outside the office of his Agos newspaper in broad daylight on Jan. 17, 2007, wrote an opinion column in the Taraf daily in which he shared the above anecdote about the prime minister's take on Çiçek, who was the justice minister at the time. Arat Dink wrote that in a conversation he had with the prime minister a few days after the assassination, he criticized the government's role in turning Hrant Dink into a target for nationalist groups, accusing it of being supportive of Justice Minister Çiçek, whose stance on the Armenians had encouraged Hrant Dink's murderers, and who on many occasions has attempted to associate Turkey's Armenian community with the terrorist Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and once called the participants in a conference on Armenian genocide “backstabbers.” During that conversation, Arat Dink said, “Shall we call him [Çiçek] our ‘blood feud enemy'?” to which Erdoğan allegedly replied, “Perhaps not that, but your ‘suspect'.”
In his lengthy opinion column, Arat Dink wrote in detail about a strange invitation Hrant Dink had received from the governor's office. Dink had in fact written about this in Agos, saying that he was summoned to the governor's office, where two National Intelligence Organization (MİT) agents warned him to be “more careful” about what he wrote. This was a week after Hrant Dink had suggested that Sabiha Gökçen, an adopted daughter of the nation's founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, was of Armenian descent. Arat Dink said the deputy governor, who was also present in the room during the meeting, initially introduced the two MİT officials as “his relatives.” During the conversation, the deputy governor and the two MİT officials, whose real identity Hrant Dink would find out later, threatened Hrant Dink, although they used expressions like “We know who you are, but society may not,” or “We are concerned that society might not be able to understand things like this.”
The Hrant Dink murder case has been fraught with controversy -- as well as some solid evidence -- suggesting that many state officials, from gendarmerie and police chiefs to bureaucrats, were either negligent in their duties and ignored all the signs that an assassination plot to kill the journalist was in the works, or, according to Dink family lawyers' claims, were in the know about the plot and did nothing, either because they agreed with it or were part of it or did not care. Other incidents and evidence that came up during the trial also indicate that there were attempts to cover up the investigation. A number of ultranationalist young men are currently standing trial as suspects, including the hitman who was 17, legally a minor, at the time of the murder. However, the masterminds of the assassination plot remain unknown. Arat Dink's opinion article provided detailed examples pointing out the unwillingness and/or the ineptitude to prevent the murder despite sound intelligence that it was in the offing, as well as hints that the Erdoğan government was protective of the individuals who seem to have, directly or indirectly, contributed to the murder and the apparent attempts to obscure evidence in the case during the trial. In addition to his allegations against Çiçek, Arat Dink accused former İstanbul Governor Muammer Güler of trivializing the murder and the ensuing investigation, including a large number of quotes from Güler's testimony to a parliamentary commission investigating the Dink murder.
Arat Dink expressed both criticism and resentment at the government for their support for Çiçek, who is currently a state minister, and Güler, who is currently running as a Justice and Development Party (AK Party) first-place candidate in Mardin.
However, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan released a message denying that he ever referred to Çiçek as a suspect, adding that he strongly condemned Arat Dink and the Taraf daily for the opinion article, which he said was untruthful.
