Turkish authorities on Wednesday detained a fugitive magazine editor who was trying to cross into Greece, two days after he was sentenced to more than 22 years in jail in a controversial case, state media said.
Nokta magazine’s managing editor Murat Capan was detained along with four others while trying to “illegally” cross into Greece by land in the Uzunkorpru district of Edirne Province, the Anadolu news agency said.
Along with Cevheri Guven, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Capan had been given a 22-and-a-half-year sentence on Monday by an Istanbul court on charges of seeking to provoke an armed rebellion against the Turkish republic.
Neither were in court for the verdict and the whereabouts of Guven was not immediately clear.
Four other people — who face accusations of links to Fethullah Gulen, the alleged mastermind of the failed July last year coup — were also detained in the sweep by Turkish border police in the province.
The US-based Gulen denies any link to the coup attempt.
Guven and Capan had been released in December 2015 pending trial in the case, the latest controversy to raise concerns over press freedoms under the rule of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
The case relates to a cover published in the staunchly anti-government and left-wing magazine after Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party swept to victory in legislative elections on Nov. 1, 2015.
The cover said that the date marked the “start of civil war in Turkey.”
The magazine was then raided and the editors detained, and it has since been shut down.
It had already been raided in September 2015 over another controversial cover.
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