ISTANBUL, Turkey —
Turkish police on Tuesday searched the premises of several pro-Kurdish
media outlets and raided journalists’ houses in Istanbul and other cities
including in the Kurdish-majority southeast — a move blasted by rights
advocates as censorship.
اضافة اعلان
Police rounded up
10 journalists in
Istanbul, the capital Ankara, as well as other cities including
in Diyarbakir in the southeast, the Turkish Journalists Union (TGS) tweeted,
without providing any reason for the detentions.
Seven of the
detained journalists work for the pro-Kurdish Mezopotamya news agency and three
for the JINNEWS, according to the union.
Mezopotamya
confirmed the arrests of its journalists including Editor-in-Chief Diren
Yurtsever.
Turkey’s
parliament this month approved a tough pre-election law that could see
reporters and social media users jailed for up to three years for spreading
“fake news”.
The new measures
on the media come before a general election that
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan enters trailing in the polls.
“At a time when
the censorship law came into effect, many journalists’ homes were raided and
the journalists were detained during the dawn operations,” the TGS said.
Opposition parties
and journalists’ unions protested the new rules before and during the debates
in the parliament.
Most Turkish
newspapers and television channels fell under the control of government
officials and their business allies during a sweeping crackdown that followed a
failed coup in 2016.
But social
networks and internet-based media remained largely free of oversight — much to
the growing annoyance of Erdogan.
Turkey is ranked
149th out of 180 countries in the annual media freedom index published by
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) earlier this year.
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