Investigation of Turkish journalists: German ambassador summoned

The apartments of two Turkish journalists from the Sabah newspaper have been searched. Because of their Gülen reporting, says the Turkish Foreign Ministry.

Jürgen Schulz, German Ambassador in Ankara, 2017 Photo: dpa

ISTANBUL/BERLIN dpa / Reuters | After a search of journalists from the Turkish newspaper “Sabah” in Hesse, Turkey summoned the German ambassador. This was announced by the Turkish Foreign Ministry on Wednesday. The background was “the unfounded arrest of representatives of the Frankfurt office of the Sabah newspaper by the German police,” the statement said.

The competent public prosecutor told the German Press Agency, however, that there had been no arrests. In a statement, it was also said that the public prosecutor’s office in Darmstadt and the police had searched the private apartments of two 46 and 51-year-old journalists in Mörfelden-Walldorf in southern Hesse on Wednesday morning.

According to the investigators, there is a suspicion of “dangerous dissemination of personal data”, as regulated in Section 126a of the Criminal Code. Storage media and other evidence were secured during the operation. The investigators did not want to give any further details because of the ongoing process.

The Turkish Foreign Ministry wrote in the statement that the journalists were targeted by the authorities for their reports on the network of preacher Fethullah Gülen after a Gülen supporter filed a complaint. She also linked the incident to Sunday’s parliamentary and presidential elections. The fact that the action took place immediately after the first round of the election was a “deliberate act”.

In the presidential elections in Turkey on Sunday, incumbent Recep Tayyip Erdoğan narrowly missed out on an absolute majority and has to face the runner-up, opposition leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, in a run-off on May 28.