BERLIN, Jan. 31 (UPI) -- Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish writer who received the 2006 Nobel Prize for literature, has canceled his trip to Germany for fear of being assassinated.
The author has received massive death threats from Turkish Nationalists, the German Koelner Stadt-Anzeiger newspaper said Wednesday.
Pamuk, 54, was to visit several major German cities and was to be given an honorary doctorate at Berlin's Free University Friday. Yet after the murder of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, security experts had advised him not to travel to Germany.
Like Dink, Pamuk in the past has spoken openly about the mass killing of Armenians in 1915, which many observers call genocide. Turkey still supports a law that bans insults against "Turkishness" and calling the killings genocide. A bid to prosecute the Nobel laureate on such charges was dropped early last year.
Yet Pamuk has attracted the wrath of Turkish Nationalists, with the alleged wirepuller of the murder of Dink publicly warning Pamuk in court.
