21.01.2016 17:55
Editor-in-Chief of the Haberdar news portal Said Sefa wrote on his Twitter account on Wednesday that he has been prohibited from leaving Turkey and asked to hand over his passport to police, without any justification being given.In series of tweets late on Wednesday, Sefa said he received a letter from.
Editor-in-Chief of the Haberdar news portal Said Sefa wrote on his Twitter account on Wednesday that he has been prohibited from leaving Turkey and asked to hand over his passport to police, without any justification being given.
In series of tweets late on Wednesday, Sefa said he received a letter from the police that was left at his door on Wednesday asking him to visit the police department in the Şişli district of İstanbul with his passport at the earliest possible time.
After visiting the Şişli Police Department on Sefa's behalf, his lawyer learned that the journalist was prohibited from leaving the country as part of an investigation, the details of which were not given to the lawyer by the police.
The journalist then requested his lawyer find out the details of the investigation through the National Judicial Network Project (UYAP) by entering the dossier number that was mentioned in the police letter. Sefa's lawyer learned that four investigations had been launched against his client in Ankara and sent to the İstanbul Public Prosecutor's Office as Sefa resides in İstanbul, and that all of the investigations were combined into one.
Sefa wrote on Twitter that his lawyer found out the name of the prosecutor who is overseeing his case; however, he did not respond to calls and a request for an appointment.
Referring to earlier tweets by Ali Özkaya, the former lawyer of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, in November 2015, Sefa said Erdoğan has filed a criminal complaint against him on charges of tweeting classified information on a Twitter account with the moniker Fuat Avni.
Rejecting the claims that he is Fuat Avni, Sefa wrote a column on Thursday saying that he and his family have been a target of the government for a long time. Underlining that he expects to also be imprisoned soon by the judiciary, which has become a tool of the government to silence dissident voices, Sefa said he will continue to stand firm as his conscience is clear.
Fuat Avni is a government whistleblower who regularly reveals information from allegedly secret meetings of high-ranking government officials and has revealed many government-initiated police operations before they have taken place.
On Nov. 18, 2015 Özkaya made the complaint public by posting it to his Twitter account. Though Özkaya stated in one of his tweets that the complaint letter was filed a year ago, Haberdar claims it was made public as part of a defamation campaign carried out against the news portal.
Fuat Avni claimed in March 2015 that the president had filed a complaint alleging that Sefa was behind the Twitter account.
[Cihan/Today's Zaman]