A Jin News reporter was detained for the fourth time in six years for her journalistic work, while another Jin News reporter received a prison term. A media worker from Yeni Yaşam also received a prison sentence on the same day.
Beritan Canözer, a female reporter for Jin News, was detained early in the morning in a police raid at her apartment in the southeastern city of Diyarbakır (Amed). She was taken to the city police station after a search in her house, Jin News reports.
Canözer was previously detained three times. In December 2015, she was detained while she was following a demonstration in Diyarbakır. According to a police statement, she was detained on “reasonable suspicion” due to her “excited appearance.” She was held in custody for months, tried and sentenced to a prison term of one year and three months in May 2016, on the charge of “making propaganda for a terrorist organisation.” The evidence consisted of notes she had taken for her news articles and her social media posts.
In June 2020, she was again sentenced to a prison term of one year and ten months, again on a charge of “making propaganda,” for posting four “comments” and one “like” on her social media account. She was detained again on 5 April after a raid at her apartment and was released three days later.
Just hours before her most recent detention, another Jin News reporter, Hikmet Tunç, was sentenced to eight months and 22 days in prison for a news article she wrote about corruption in the Muradiye municipality in the eastern province of Van (Wan), Jin News reported.
Muradiye municipality is under the administration of a trustee, appointed by Ankara since December 2019. Tunç has been sentenced on a charge of insulting the trustee.
In the third incident affecting a media worker within a 24-hour period, İbrahim Karakaş, a worker at the daily Yeni Yaşam, was sentenced to nine years and nine months in prison on a charge of “being a member of a terror organisation”, Yeni Yaşam reports. He had been arrested on 6 November 2020 and has been in custody since then.
The court based its ruling on the statement of a witness, the news archive of Karakaş, and the fact that his mobile phone was turned off.
