Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has said he never depicted his deputy, Cemil Çiçek, as a “suspect” in Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink’s murder during a conversation with Dink’s son in 2007.

The claim was made Arat Dink in a column for the liberal daily Taraf. “We asked Prime Minister during his visit to our house to express his condolences whether we could mention about former Justice Minister C.Ç. [Cemil Çiçek] as a ‘murderer’” in pointing to Hrant Dink as a target, Arat Dink wrote in his piece. “The Prime Minister rightly guided us by saying, ‘Don’t call him a murderer, call him a suspect.’”

Erdoğan denied the conversation with Arat Dink in a speech he made in Kars on the Armenian border, Hurriyet Daily News reported.

“If this boy said so, then I deplore him. But I condemn this newspaper for this story,” he said during an election campaign. “I have never used such an expression for my Deputy Prime Minister.”

A lawyer for the Dink family refused to make comments.