“He reiterated his call for justice for his friend, Hrant Dink, and said that tomorrow he planned to take his daughter to school,” IPI’s Steven Ellis said.
We got the call at 6.30 pm. We had attended the Oda TV hearing earlier in the day and after that we met with some journalists. We figured that no news by that time meant that this was like all the other times when we hoped against hope that Nedim Sener would be released. But I started to hope again when I heard the excitement in my colleague’s voice. Nedim Sener, Ahmet Sik and two others were ordered released. We spent the next five minutes calling everyone to share the news. We also knew that it wasn’t really real until they were free, so we finally grabbed a car and raced for Silivri, some 80 km outside of Istanbul. Along the way, during the 90 minute drive, we heard from Sener’s wife, who was just ahead of us in traffic. We stopped at a truck stop briefly and we saw Sener’s sister and his daughter, also en route. It looked like it was really happening.
We arrived at the prison after 9 pm. It was cold, wet and muddy. The temperature was just above freezing and a mist that threatened to turn to snow at any time was falling. There were already at least five television trucks, and at least 10-15 cameramen on a perimeter just outside the entrance gate to the prison, along with another 50 people, a number that probably doubled in the next hour.