Istanbul court wants cell phone records in Dink murder case

PanARMENIAN.Net - An Istanbul court hearing the Hrant Dink murder trial has again asked for the records of all cell phone conversations made in the area at the time of the journalist’s assassination following the Telecommunications Directorate, or TİB’s, earlier refusal to grant the request, Hürriyet Daily News reported.

“All administrative corporations do whatever they can so that we can’t obtain information – the TİB is just a part of this process,” Hakan Bakırcı, one of the Dink family’s lawyers, said, adding that it is difficult to make headway in the case. Despite the past problems, Bakırcı praised the court for again insisting on collecting more evidence.

TİB refused the court’s first request on the grounds that issuing all the phone records would be “a violation of the privacy.”

The court is trying to determine whether two suspicious people recorded by security cameras talking to each other at the murder scene were connected to the journalist’s murder. Mobile phone base records can show all phone activities of an area at a given time, and Dink lawyers have officially demanded the records from the GSM operators. One of the operating companies responded to the request saying there were no mobile phone calls made during those hours, while another answered that there was no base station in the area, even though the murder occurred in one of the most populous districts of the city.

Dink’s friend and an editor in Agos, Pakrad Öztukyan, said he believes TİB resisted handing over the records because of the risk of much deeper connections being disclosed.

“The Dink case will never end,” Öztukyan said. “This case has such a dark background that it might as well be connected to the Ergenekon case.”