ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — Four journalists were detained by Turkish security forces on unknown charges on Tuesday, the pro-Kurdish news outlets they work for have reported – including a reporter who revealed the alleged torture of two Kurdish men by security forces last month.
Police raided the offices of the Mezopotamya Agency (MA) and Jin News in the city of Van, eastern Turkey in the early hours of Tuesday, the two news agencies reported.
MA said that its reporters Adnan Bilen and Cemil Ugur were detained at its office, while the all-women Jin News agency said that reporters Sehriban Abi and Nazan Sala were taken by security forces from its office.
MA reporter Ugur wrote in mid-September that Turkish security forces had detained two Kurdish men and thrown them out of a helicopter in Van province. One of the two victims died last week.
Security forces did not detail why they had detained the journalists and seized their technical equipment, MA reported, and it is not known if Ugur's detention is directly linked to his coverage of the helicopter incident.
The four journalists have been barred from seeing their lawyers for 24 hours, both agencies reported on Tuesday afternoon.
Turkey is among the world's biggest jailers of journalists, international press freedom groups have said. Turkish authorities imprisoned 47 journalists in 2019 alone, according to data from the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).
The detention of MA and Jin News journalists follows last week's raids on the offices of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) over alleged responsibility of party members in 2014 protests in solidarity with Kobane, a Kurdish city in northern Syria then under attack by Islamic State (ISIS).
Tens of people were detained in the raids, including Ayhan Bilgen, mayor of the city of Kars.
The fresh raids have drawn domestic and international condemnation.
“Detaining politicians from a party that won nearly 12 percent of the vote in the 2018 general election is part of the Turkish government’s policy to criminalize political opposition,” deputy program director at Human Rights Watch Tom Porteous said on Friday.
“The last few years provide ample evidence that Turkey’s courts are all too quick to do the government’s bidding, and this is the latest example.”
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