Prosecutor says Murat Sabuncu and 13 others from secular daily under investigation over links to PKK and preacher Gulen as post-coup crackdown widens.
Turkish police detained the editor-in-chief of the opposition newspaper Cumhuriyet, state media reported Monday, while CNN Turk broadcaster said 13 arrest warrants were issued for the daily’s journalists and executives, with the local prosecutor’s office saying they were under investigations for supporting “terror organizations.”
The Istanbul prosecutor said in a statement quoted by Turkish media that the newspaper and the Cumhuriyet Foundation, which owns the daily, were being investigated over links to the PKK and the Gulen movement.
The investigation was probing whether they committed crimes on behalf of the two “terror organizations”, the prosecutor said.
The PKK — proscribed as a terrorist organization by Ankara, the EU and US — has waged an insurgency inside Turkey since 1984.
The daily said an arrest warrant was also issued for its former editor-in-chief, Can Dundar, who was sentenced in May by a Turkish court to five years and 10 months in prison for allegedly revealing state secrets.
On Friday, the European Parliament called on the Turkish government and its conservative president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to “narrow the scope of emergency measures, so that they can no longer be used to curtail freedom of expression” and to free all jailed journalists not proven to have been involved in the coup attempt.
