An İstanbul court ruled to release pending trial Ege Akersoy, a university student who earlier this month was detained and arrested for assaulting a demonstrator during an anti-Israel protest, local media reported.
The court concluded that Akersoy’s pretrial detention was not proportionate to the charges leveled against him.
A fourth-year engineering student at Yıldız Technical University in İstanbul, Akersoy was arrested after he punched a man carrying an Islamic flag during an anti-Israel protest that was organized by the pro-gov’t Turkey Youth Foundation (TÜGVA), which counts Bilal Erdoğan, the son of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, among its members.
The incident and Akersoy’s subsequent arrest inflamed Turkey’s secular-religious divide since the Islamic flag was interpreted by many commentators as a symbol of the caliphate, representing hostility towards Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Turkish Republic who abolished the caliphate in 1924.
Nationalist opposition factions have been campaigning for his release.
The outbreak of the war in Gaza has also led to polarization between pro-gov’t and nationalist segments of society, with the former adopting a pro-Palestinian stance for religious reasons and the latter rejecting the Palestinian cause, gravitating towards the anti-Arab sentiment that has been triggered by the influx of millions of Syrian refugees in the last decade.
Turkish authorities are often accused by human rights groups of using police custody and pretrial detention as a weapon of intimidation, employing them in unjustified contexts or in a disproportionate manner.
