Turkish police detained a 17-year-old male on Saturday suspected of murdering journalist Hrant Dink, one of Turkey's most prominent ethnic Armenians, whose slaying sent shock waves through the country.
Ogun Samast was captured on a bus in the Black Sea port city of Samsun, Istanbul Governor Muammer Guler told reporters.
He was en route to his nearby home town of Trabzon, a nationalist stronghold, still carrying the gun he allegedly used to shoot Dink, 53, three times in the head and the neck outside the office of his Agos weekly in downtown Istanbul on Friday, Guler said.
Six other people suspected of being involved in the assassination were detained in Trabzon.
The NTV news channel quoted Samsun prosecutor Ahmet Gokcinar as saying that Samast confessed to gunning down Dink in his first interrogation.
Samast, a jobless secondary school graduate, was reportedly involved in extreme nationalist groups.
Dink was a critic of the official line on the massacres of Armenians under the Ottoman Empire, which he labeled as genocide, and was last year given a suspended six-month jail sentence for insulting "Turkishness."
Nationalists had branded him a "traitor" and Dink wrote in his recent articles that he received threats and hate mail.
The hunt for the suspect, caught on the security camera of a bank near the site of the attack, gained speed after his father called police to identify the young man in the images.
The images released by the police showed a lean, young man clad in a denim jacket and jeans and wearing a white beret. He was seen holding an object, which officials said was a gun, under his jacket.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan hailed Samast's detention "in the name of democracy and the struggle for freedom."
All seven detainees were to be flown to Istanbul, where three other people were taken into custody on Friday but later released.
"All their links are being investigated," Guler said. "The investigation will show whether any [illegal] organization is involved."
Samast allegedly came to the Agos office about three hours before the attack, presented himself as a student and asked to see Dink, Guler quoted Agos secretaries as telling the police.
He was turned down and when one of the secretaries went out about two hours later she saw him still standing in the street outside.
The press condemned the murder as a "national disgrace" and called for the journalist's funeral, scheduled for tomorrow, to become a mass event in the name of democracy and peace in Turkey.
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