Turks mourn dead Armenian

last updated 8 January 2015

Istanbul

In a moving display of ethnic tolerance, 100,000 people marched through Istanbul this week to mourn a murdered ethnic Armenian journalist. Hrant Dink, 52, was gunned down in daylight outside the office of his newspaper, Agos. Dink had angered Turkish nationalists with his articles on the Armenian genocide of World War I, still a taboo topic in Turkey. Many Turks on the march carried signs written in both Turkish and Armenian, reading, “We are all Armenians.” There are only about 60,000 ethnic Armenians in Turkey, out of a total population of 70 million, and Turkey has long had poor relations with neighboring Armenia. Police said Yasin Hayal, a Turkish nationalist militant who bombed a McDonald’s in 2004, confessed to hiring a teenage hit man to kill Dink.