Hackers broke into the website of the Turkish and Armenian-language newspaper Agos Thursday and succeeded in posting a photo of Ogün Samast – the youth who is on trial for the January 2007 murder of the newspaper’s founder, Hrant Dink – together with a Turkish flag background and around 10 lines of ultra-nationalistic comments, Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported.
Headlined “Our good morning to Ogün Samast,” the content left by the hackers continued to be visible for several minutes on the site, which is now inaccessible. The cyber-attack came just four days after the 12th hearing in the trial of Samast, who is the alleged shooter, and several other people of accused of having a role in Dink’s murder.
“At a time of mounting setbacks and irregularities in the trial of Hrant Dink’s murders and great difficulty for the Dink family in obtaining information essential for the murder investigation, this attacks shows to what degree the nationalist elements in Turkish society feel they can do as they please,” Paris-based RSF said.
“We already warned that the lack of a clear determination on the part of the authorities to identify and try all those responsible for this murder would just encourage the ultra-nationalist groups,” it added. “We have had new evidence of this today. It is time the government reacted before a new tragedy takes place.”
The text left by the hackers defended Dink’s murder “in the name of the Republic of Turkey’s flag, which does not appear on this site” and threatened the newspaper’s staff. If the content posted by the newspaper was not corrected, “there will be new Ogün Samasts and new Hrant Dinks,” it warned.
After more comments such as “either you love this country or you leave it, or you disappear like Hrant Dink,” the text ended with the words “The game is over” in uppercase.
