A prominent newspaper editor and leading figure in Turkey's Armenian community has been murdered in Istanbul.

Hrant Dink, a vigorous defender of Armenians who frequently fell foul of the Government's free-speech laws and hardline Turkish nationalists, was shot several times in the neck as he emerged from the offices of the Agos newspaper in Istanbul this afternoon.

In his final newspaper column Dink, 53, described how his willingness to criticise the Government and articulate the views of Turkey's Armenian community had led to dozens of death threats. He complained that he had been offered no protection by the police.

"My computer’s memory is loaded with sentences full of hatred and threats," he wrote. "I am just like a pigeon ... I look around to my left and right, in front and behind me as much as it does. My head is just as active."

Witnesses and Turkish media reports described the gunman as a young man, around 18 or 19, wearing denim jacket and a white hat. The Turkish Prime Minister later said that two men had been arrested over the shooting and top officials from the Justice Department had been appointed to investigate.

The killing of Dink, who was convicted last year under laws that forbid journalists from "insulting Turkish identity", caused the Turkish stock market to fall. The country's fractious relationship with its writers and its past, notably the Armenian genocide that followed the First World War, is seen as a major obstacle to Turkey's eventual admission to the EU.

At a rushed news conference, the Prime Minister, Tayyip Erdogan, described the murder as an attack on Turkey's peace and stability. Hundreds of bystanders gathered around Dink's body, which lay face down and covered by a white sheet, and chanted "the murderer Government will pay".

Friends of Dink said the writer and editor challenged Turkey's reluctance to face up to its past and failure to properly respect its minority communities. "Hrant was a perfect target for those who want to obstruct Turkey’s democratisation and its path towards the European Union," said Aydin Engin, a journalist for Agos, where Dink's brother also works.

"This bullet was fired against Turkey... an image has been created about Turkey that its Armenian citizens have no safety," Taha Akyol, the editor of CNN Turk.

Dink had been prosecuted several times because of articles published in Agos, an influential bilingual newspaper that appears in Turkish and Armenian. He was unafraid to confront the Government with the history of the Armenian genocide and in late 2005 was charged with insulting Turkey for referring to the long-held Armenian wish to live separately from Turks.

Last July, Dink told Reuters that his writings had led to several death threats but that he refused to go abroad, a decision his friends spoke of with dismay today.

"I will not leave this country. If I go I would feel I was leaving alone the people struggling for democracy in this country. It would be a betrayal of them. I could never do this," he said.

In the end, Dink was convicted of trying to influence his trial by allowing a series of articles to appear in Agos criticising Turkey's penal code. His six-month suspended prison sentence — an unusually harsh penalty — was then upheld last year by Turkey's court of appeal, a verdict that led to condemnation from Brussels. Earlier this month, he predicted that 2007 would a difficult year, but that he would survive.

"For me, 2007 is likely to be a hard year. The trials will continue, new ones will be started. Who knows what other injustices I will be up against?"

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