An unidentified person who drove in a taxi by the building of opposition daily Cumhuriyet in Şişli district of İstanbul shot at the wall across the building.
Friday morning at 6.45 a.m., an unidentified person in a taxi driving by the building of Cumhuriyet daily took two shots at a wall across the building. A 9-mm empty cartridge and a bullet were reportedly found at the scene of the incident. As police has launched an investigation in the crime scene, Arif Kızılyalın, a journalist of Cumhuriyet daily has reported about the attack on Twitter.
News editor Aykut Küçükkaya has also made a statement to the journalists that “a person driving by a taxi at around 6.45 a.m. has taken two shots. One shot has hit the wall of the cemetery. The person is considered to be drunk.”
Cumhuriyet daily’s former editor-in-chief Can Dündar had escaped unharmed from an armed attack in front of the İstanbul Çağlayan courthouse on May 6, 2016 following the fourth hearing of a case due to stories published about Turkish intelligence trucks bound for Syria with hidden weapons in early 2014.
Turkish police have raided the houses of many journalists working at Cumhuriyet daily and detained numbers of journalists and executives of the paper. An Istanbul court has ordered the chief editor and eight senior staffers at Cumhuriyet newspaper to be jailed as Turkey continues its crackdown on opposition.
Stockholm Center for Freedom, an advocacy group that monitors rights violations in Turkey, issued a report on March 1, 2017, saying that the number of jailed journalist has reached to a new record of 200 with Germany’s Die Welt, Deniz Yücel being among new arrestees.
Of these journalists, 179 are arrested pending trial and without a conviction. Most of the journalists do not even know what the charges are or what evidence, if any, the government has because the indictments were not filed yet. Also, over 180 media outlets have been closed by AKP government last year.
March 3, 2017
