ISTANBUL, Jan 21: A 17-year-old prime suspect in the killing of Turkish journalist Hrant Dink, one of his country's most prominent ethnic Armenians, has confessed to the murder, a prosecutor said on Sunday.

“He admitted he committed the murder” in his preliminary interrogation in the Black Sea port of Samsun, where he was arrested overnight, the city's chief prosecutor Ahmet Gokcinar told Anatolia news agency.

The suspect, Ogun Samast, reportedly said he shot Dink because the journalist insulted the Turkish nation.

“I shot him after saying the Friday prayers. I'm not sorry,” the CNN Turk news channel quoted him as saying in his testimony. “I read news on the Internet. He said: “I’m from Turkey but Turkish blood is dirty” and that's why I decided to kill him.” Dink, 53, was one of the taboo-breaking critics of the official line on the massacre of Armenians in 1915-17 under the Ottoman Empire, which he labelled 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 recent articles in his bilingual Turkish-Armenian weekly Agos that he received threats.

Samast, a jobless secondary school graduate reportedly involved with nationalist groups, was detained on board a bus in Samsun, while he was returning from Istanbul to his northeastern hometown of Trabzon.

He was still carrying the gun he allegedly used to shoot Dink three times in the head and the neck outside the Agos office in downtown Istanbul on Friday afternoon, officials said.

The boy was arrested with the help of his father, who tipped off the police after the authorities released pictures of his son caught on the security camera of a bank near the scene of the murder.

—AFP