A Turkish court has jailed journalist Derya Okatan over classified documents found on an external hard drive, although she denied any connection to the files and said she saw them for the first time while in custody, the Kısa Dalga news website reported.
Okatan, a member of the disciplinary board of the DİSK Basın-İş labor union, was detained at her home in Ankara on October 2 and taken to İstanbul. The İstanbul 1st Criminal Magistrate of Peace ordered her jailed pending trial the same day. She was sent to Bakırköy Women’s Prison in İstanbul.
A gendarmerie examination found hundreds of files on the hard drive, some of which the court said were classified documents concerning the central province of Çorum that should only be in the possession of the security forces.
Okatan denied the accusations, saying she had used the external hard drive as a movie archive, had no connection to the documents and saw them for the first time while in gendarmerie custody.
Okatan also told the court that authorities had seized the same hard drive in 2019 in a separate investigation into her journalistic activities. She said she was not questioned about the documents at the time and called for an investigation into when they were put on the drive.
Her lawyer, Ziya Ergin, said the documents dated from 1990 to 2004 and included intelligence and profiling records concerning Çorum. He said a forensic image of the hard drive had been taken and examined by an expert during the 2019 investigation. According to Ergin, Okatan did not use the drive after it was returned, while metadata showed the files were last modified or accessed in 2010.
The defense has requested that the 2019 forensic image be compared with the drive’s current contents to determine whether the disputed files were already present at the time and whether any subsequent changes were made.
According to Ergin, prosecutors referred Okatan directly to the court with a request that she be jailed pending trial, without questioning her or investigating how the documents came to be on the hard drive.
Okatan has previously faced prosecution over her journalistic work. She was among six journalists who stood trial over their reporting on emails of then-energy minister Berat Albayrak that were hacked and leaked by the RedHack group. She was acquitted of all charges in 2021, but an appeals court overturned her acquittal on a charge of unlawfully obtaining or disseminating personal data in 2022 and ordered a retrial.
In February Okatan and six other journalists were sentenced to 18 days in prison for allegedly recording audio or video during the final hearing of the high-profile Kobani trial, accusations they denied. The trial concerns dozens of Kurdish politicians and activists accused of inciting violence during 2014 protests related to the siege of the Syrian Kurdish town of Kobani by the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).
According to Expression Interrupted, a press freedom monitoring group, 23 journalists are currently behind bars in Turkey. The country’s deteriorating media landscape was further pointed out in the 2026 World Press Freedom Index published by Reporters Without Borders (RSF), where it was ranked 163rd out of 180 nations.
