Turkey Detains Pro-Kurdish News Editor Over Last Year’s Tweets

Hamza AktanKABUL: (MEP) Turkey on Saturday has detained the chief news editor of a pro-Kurdish television channel over tweets posted on his account, including retweets of the views of two prominent pro-Kurdish commentators.

The news editor of IMC TV, Hamza Aktan, was detained by masked and armed police in a raid on his home in Istanbul, the channel said in a statement on its website.

It said that Aktan was now being interrogated by police, who were in particular focusing on tweets he had shared in 2015.

Aktan was released after being held in custody for some 12 hours, but he still faces accusations from prosecutors of making propaganda for a “terror group”, it added. According to IMC, he was released under judicial control, meaning that he will have to report regularly to the police.

“Judicial control, like detention, is a form of punishment. This is right neither as a journalist or as a citizen. This is a challenge to freedom of expression,” pro-Kurdish IMC quoted Aktan as saying after his release.

Part of the case against him was also that he had retweeted a request by the BBC for information from the mainly Kurdish town of Cizre while it was under military curfew.

Aktan’s detention comes amid growing alarm over the increasing arrests and convictions of journalists under the rule of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who became head of state in 2014 after over a decade as premier.

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