A court on Thursday ordered the arrest of editor-in-chief of the Cumhuriyetnewspaper Can Dundar and reporter Erdem Gul over the publication of footage purporting to show the state intelligence agency helping send weapons to Syria.
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The journalists, who deny the allegations against them, reported that trucks belonging to the Turkish intelligence agency MIT were used to carry weapons to Islamist opposition groups in Syria.
Turkey has said it only supports moderate rebels in Syria, although it wants to see the Assad government toppled.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan filed an individual criminal complaint against Dundar and Cumhuriyet on June 2, claiming that the story “included some footage and information that are not factual” while saying the person “who wrote the story will pay a heavy price”. “We are not spies, we are not traitors, we are not heroes; we are journalists”, he added. “We came here to defend people’s right to be informed, their right to learn the truth if the government is lying”, said Can Dündar, the senior of the two men.
Over 1,000 protesters on Friday staged a demonstration outside the Istanbul premises of the opposition Cumhuriyet newspaper against the arrest of the paper’s two journalists, accused of spying over a news report.
In February, Mr Dundar, 54, was called to testify on separate charges of insulting Mr Erdogan, one of scores of such cases opened since Mr Erdogan moved from the prime ministry to the presidency past year.
MIT, meanwhile, insisted the trucks had been carrying humanitarian aid rather than arms.
The Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) said that the charges represented yet another blow for press freedom in Turkey, where media critical of Erdogan have been targeted in a crackdown.
“There is a crime that has been committed by the state that they are trying to cover up”, Can Dundar said as he arrived at the court in Istanbul, according to Today’s Zaman.
The U.S. embassy, in a tweet, expressed great concern about what it said appears to another media outlet under pressure.
“Journalists facing life in prison for their reporting deemed risky by the authorities is unacceptable”, the OSCE’s media freedom representative Dunja Mijatovic said yesterday. Reporters Without Borders rates the country 149th of 180 countries in its 2015 Press Freedom Index.
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On Thursday night, Figen Yuksekdag and Selahattin Demirtas, pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) chairmen, condemned the Turkish authorities’ actions “in the strongest terms”.
