Fighting in the streets of Istanbul and Ankara last week left almost 300 people dead and over 1,400 injured as part of the Turkish military’s attempted overthrow of the govermnet of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
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The Telecommunications Communications Board, Turkey’s Internet watchdog, said it had taken an “administrative measure” against the website – a term it commonly uses when blocking access to sites.
The source of the emails was not connected to the coup plotters or to a rival political party or state, WikiLeaks said. WikiLeaks went on to suggest that the Turkish government might be behind the attack on the organization.
The document-leaking organization said earlier Monday it was preparing to release 300,000 emails and 500,000 documents related to the failed Turkish coup Friday. “The emails come from “akparti.org.tr”, the AKP’s primary domain”.
“It should be noted that emails associated with the domain are mostly used for dealing with the world, as opposed to the most sensitive internal matters”, the non-profit said.
It said the government would likely censor its citizens to prevent them from reading the documents, which WikiLeaks claimed were “on politics leading up to the coup”.
The “megaleak”, according to the group, contains information it believes will both help and hurt AKP, also known as the Justice and Development Party – a pro-western social conservative movement formed in 2001 by Mr. Erdogan, the democratically elected president who was the target last week of an unsuccessful military coup.
“We ask that Turks are ready with censorship bypassing systems such as TorBrowser and uTorrent”.
The Turkish government has arrested 7,000 people in connection with the coup attempt.
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Turkey has blocked access to Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites in the past, and Erdoğan has in recent years intensified his crackdown on journalists and dissident websites.
