Eight more journalists were convicted on Wednesday of disseminating terrorist propaganda while serving as the symbolic editor-in-chief for a day of the now-closed Kurdish Özgür Gündem daily in 2016, Turkish media reported.
Apart from journalists Faruk Eren, Ertuğrul Mavioğlu, Celal Başlangıç, İhsan Çaralan, Fehim Işık and Öncü Akgül, Celalettin Can was also given 15 months in prison but his sentence was not suspended.
Hüseyin Aykol, the former editor-in-chief of Özgür Gündem, was also sentenced to three years, nine months in prison on the same charge. Akyol is currently free pending appeal.
A solidarity campaign for Özgür Gündem, the one-day symbolic editor-in-chief routine was conducted between May and August 2016, in which 56 journalists, lawyers and human rights activists participated.
Forty-nine of them were subject to prosecution, and the newspaper was closed by government decree in October 2016 after a controversial coup that gave the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan vast authorities under a subsequent state of emergency. (SCF with turkishminute.com)
