PHOTO: The Turkish convoy reportedly carrying arms to Syria, January 2014 (DHA)
Turkey’s authorities arrested two journalists on Thursday over their story which claimed that trucks controlled by Turkish intelligence carried arms to Syria in early 2014.
The editor-in-chief and Ankara Bureau Chief of the daily Cumhuriyet were detained on Thursday.
“We are accused of ‘spying’. The President said ‘treason’. We are not traitors, spy, or heroes; we are journalists. What we have done here was a journalistic activity,” editor Can Dündar said before testifying to prosecutors.
Dündar and bureau chief Erdem Gül were arrested on charges of espionage and membership of of the Fethullahist Terrorist Organization, a term used by prosecutors for followers of US-based Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen.
Footage released by Cumhuriyet on May 29 reportedly showed gendarmerie and police officers opening weapons and ammunition crates on the back of trucks sent to Syria by the Turkish intelligence agency MİT in January 2014.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan filed a criminal complaint against Dündar and Cumhuriyet on June 2, claiming that the story “included some footage and information that are not factual” and warning that the person “who wrote the story will pay a heavy price”.
The criminal complaint said the newspaper “participated in the actions” of Gülen, whose movement Erdoğan accuses of infiltrating the police, the judiciary, and the bureaucracy.
Erdoğan said on Tuesday that the truth of the story was irrelevant, because it was a “betrayal”: “What difference would it make whether the trucks contained weapons or not?” However, he maintained that the trucks were delivering humanitarian aid to Turkmens in northwest Syria and that the journalists were complicit in “sabotaging” the effort.
