A Turkish court on Friday arrested prize-winning novelist Asli Erdogan over alleged links to Kurdish militants, the Haberturk newspaper reported, three days after she and two dozen more staff from the pro-Kurdish Ozgur Gundem newspaper were detained.
Ozgur Gundem was on Tuesday closed by court order on grounds of spreading propaganda of the militant Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), deemed a terrorist organization by Turkey, the US and EU.
Turkey has closed more than 130 media outlets since a state of emergency was declared following a failed military coup on July 15, stirring concern among Western allies and rights groups about deteriorating press freedoms.
A government official has denied the action against Ozgur Gundem is linked to the state of emergency.
However, an international media watchdog saw it as part of a widespread purge in the wake of the putsch.
Erdogan, a member of the paper’s advisory board, was sent to a jail in Istanbul on preliminary charges of “membership of terrorist organization” and “undermining national unity,” the pro-government Haberturk said on its Web site.
It said two editors of the paper were still in custody.
A total of 25 staff of Ozgur Gundem, which has a circulation of 7,500, were detained on Tuesday on suspicion of supporting the PKK, following the decision to close the paper.
The detentions had brought the number of imprisoned Turkish media workers to about 100, based on figures from the European Federation of Journalists media watchdog, making Turkey the world’s biggest jailer of journalists.
However, the pro-government Sabah newspaper on Thursday said 22 of the Ozgur Gundem staff had been released.
Ozgur Gundem focuses on the PKK conflict in Turkey’s mainly Kurdish southeast and has faced dozens of investigations, fines and the arrest of correspondents since 2014.
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