Turkish investigative journalist Mehmet Baransu has been arrested and charged with obtaining secret state documents.
The allegations against him are extraordinary. They relate to articles published under his byline by his newspaper, Taraf, in 2010.
Baransu was given documents by an anonymous source which revealed that army officers had plotted a coup against Turkey’s government in 2003. Baransu later provided prosecutors with the classified documents and CDs, but did not name his source.
Although the officers argued that the evidence against them was fabricated, several received sentences of up to 20 years in prison for their part in the coup plot codenamed Sledgehammer.
But in 2014, Turkey’s highest court ruled that the authorities had violated the officers’ right to a fair trial, paving the way for their release from prison and fresh hearings.
The case against Baransu comes amid increasing tension between the Turkish ruling party, the AKP, founded by the president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and the Gülen movement, an organisation linked to the US-based Islamic cleric, Fethullah Gülen.
The AKP originally backed the Sledgehammer prosecutions but has since backtracked, blaming the Gülen movement for fabricating evidence.
Under Erdoğan’s administration, scores of journalists have ended up in jail on disputed charges. After a string of releases, seven (not including Baransu) are now in prison, according to CPJ statistics.
Baransu’s lawyer, Sercan Sakallı, told the Committee for the Protection of Journalists (CPJ) that the authorities appear most concerned about a classified document entitled “The Sovereign Action Plan”.
It was among a packet of documents that Baransu gave to prosecutors in 2010. At the time, the authorities did not question his possession of it. Sakallı says that Baransu faces up to eight years in prison if convicted of its illegal possession.
Taraf’s founding editor, Ahmet Altan, defended Baransu in an article published by the daily paper Cumhuriyet. He wrote:
“Since when have coup plans been classified as ‘documents related to state security’ and ‘state knowledge that needs to be kept classified?’
I am the person who published the [Sledgehammer] story, the one who decided it needed to be published, the one who didn’t doubt for a moment that Sledgehammer was a coup plot”.
Nina Ognianova, CPJ’s Europe and central Asia programme coordinator, called for Baransu’s release. She said: “A journalist’s job is to report on developments in the public interest, and it is absurd that a journalist should be prosecuted for obtaining documents which, in any case, were shared with authorities”.
Sources: AP/AFP via Deutsche Welle/Today’s Zaman/CPJ