Anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks has released almost 300,000 emails linked to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ruling AKP party, with Turkey immediately blocking access on Wednesday.
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WikiLeaks said the emails came from the party’s web domain akparti.org.tr and mainly related to world affairs and not “the most sensitive internal matters”.
“WikiLeaks has moved forward its publication schedule in response to the government’s post-coup purges”, WikiLeaks said in the release.
“Part one of the series covers 762 mail boxes beginning with “A” through to “I” containing 294,548 email bodies together with many thousands of attached files”, WikiLeaks said on its website.
“We have verified the material and the source, who is not connected, in any way, to the elements behind the attempted coup, or to a rival political party or state”, WikiLeaks said.
On Tuesday (July 19), the WikiLeaks released almost 3,00,00 emails dating between 2010 and July 6 this year said in its website that the date of their publication was brought ahead “in response to the government’s post-coup purges”.
The organization then revealed on Twitter on Monday that its infrastructure was “under sustained attack”, and that although it wasn’t sure of the origin of the attack, the Turkish state could be behind it. WikiLeaks went on to suggest that the Turkish government might be behind the attack on the organization.
WikiLeaks said it obtained the emails a week before Friday’s attempted coup.
“Turks will likely be censored to prevent them reading our pending release of 100k+ docs on politics leading up to the coup”, the organisation said on Monday via Twitter. “We will prevail & publish”, WikiLeaks tweeted.
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“The role of internet and press freedoms in defeating the coup presents a significant opportunity”, Zeynep Tufekci, assistant professor at the University of North Carolina School of Information, wrote in a New York Times opinion piece this week.
