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ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Turkey’s foreign ministry on Wednesday condemned the arrest of two journalists working for a Turkish pro-government newspaper by Frankfurt police, summoning Germany’s ambassador to Ankara over the issue.
The English edition of Sabah reported on Wednesday that the newspaper’s German representative Ismail Erel and European edition’s chief editor Cemil Albay were briefly arrested by Frankfurt police earlier in the day.
“Police also searched the Sabah offices in Frankfurt and seized Erel and Albay’s computers and mobile phones,” added the news outlet.
The Turkish foreign ministry said in a statement that it “strongly” condemns the “heinous act.”
“We consider the outright detention of these press members by the German authorities without even requesting their statements as a deliberate act right after the successfully held first round of the Presidential Elections and the 28th Term Parliamentary Elections,” read the statement, referring to Sunday’s vote in which the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its nationalist allies secured a parliamentary majority but President Recep Tayyip Erdogan failed to win over 50 percent of the votes. The second round of the presidential polls will take place on May 28.
German Ambassador to Ankara Jurgen Schulz was summoned by Turkey’s foreign ministry before the journalists were released, according to state media.
Sabah claimed that the journalists were arrested after two alleged members of the Fethullah Gulen Movement, which is accused by Ankara of orchestrating the 2016 failed coup attempt against Erdogan, filed a lawsuit against them.
Sabah is affiliated to the pro-Erdogan Turkuvaz Media Group which includes dozens of TV channels, radios and newspapers.
Berlin has yet to comment on the arrests.
“German authorities could have invited journalists and directed their questions about this complaint. Instead of this, they arrested them and seized their mobile phones and laptops,” Fatih Zingal, a lawyer representing Sabah, told Turkish state media on Wednesday.
Diplomatic tensions between Ankara and Berlin over freedom of speech are not new. Turkish authorities detained the German-Turkish journalist Deniz Yuce in 2017 for terror-related charges for about one year.
Germany in 2019 slammed Turkey for rejecting to issue accreditations to two German journalists.
Turkey has been widely criticized for crackdowns on Kurdish journalist at home, accusing them of having ties to the Kurdish rebels.
Turkey is among the Committee to Protect Journalists’ (CPJ) list of top five jailers of journalists for the year 2022.
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