Exiled Turkish journalist sentenced to 27 years in jail

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — Turkish journalist Can Dundar has been sentenced in absentia to more than 27 years in prison on espionage and terror-related charges, the state-run Anadolu Agency reported on Wednesday.

Dundar, former editor-in-chief of the opposition newspaper Cumhuriyet, was sentenced to 27 years and six months for “espionage” and “aiding an armed terrorist organisation” at Istanbul's Caglayan courthouse.

He fled to Germany in 2016 after an Istanbul court sentenced him to five years in prison for publishing a report on Turkish intelligence allegedly supplying weapons to Islamist rebel fighters in Syria, along with a video of police finding weapons hidden under boxes of medicine.

"Whoever wrote this story will pay a heavy price for this. I will not let him go unpunished,” Deutsche Welle reported Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan as saying in a live television statement at the time.

Dundar's lawyers boycotted Wednesday's hearing because they did not believe they would get a fair trial, according to AFP.

An additional arrest warrant was issued for the journalist in 2018 over alleged support for the 2013 Gezi Park protests against Erdogan.

A Turkish court back in August ordered the seizure of Dundar’s property and the freezing of his bank accounts.

In June, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) reported that Turkey had blocked the website of Ozguruz radio station, founded by Dundar back in 2017, for the twentieth time. 

“The persistent blocking of Ozguruz’s website shows that Turkish authorities are pursuing a vindictive campaign to strip Can Dundar of his audience – having already taken his freedom to live and work in his own country,” said CPJ‘s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator Gulnoza Said.

Dundar received the CPJ’s International Press Freedom Award in 2016.

This year has seen a record number of journalists jailed worldwide, the watchdog announced earlier this month, with Turkey coming in second place for the imprisonment of journalists, putting 37 behind bars.