Hürriyet Daily News
The head of the Turkey’s Telecommunications Directorate (TİB) Fethi Şimşek said the organization handed in the necessary phone records in the case of murdered Armenian journalist Hrant Dink to the court, despite first objecting to the request.
Fethi Şimşek said yesterday in a press meeting that the requested phone records were sent to the court in November 2011, and that TİB should not be accused of neglecting its duties. The reason that they first objected to sharing the records with the court was grounded in legal bases, he added. “The Ministry of Justice said in 2007 that phone records could not be used in such investigations, which debarred us from sharing the base station records. We opposed sharing the phone records based on these legal facts, but when our oppositions were rejected we enforced the law. We sent the records that the court asked for in the Dink case. The court ordered us to send the records Jan. 17., 2012 which means that those records were in the file for one and half months. If they know what they are searching for in these records, they can reach concrete results in one day, or even a couple of hours,” said Şimşek.
Upon the Dink family lawyer’s requests, the Istanbul court hearing the Hrant Dink murder trial has for the second time asked for the records of all cell-phone conversations made in the area at the time of the journalist’s assassination, following TİB’s earlier refusal to grant the request.
