<\/p>\n
Turkey on Thursday stepped up a crackdown on media coverage of mass protests since the arrest of Istanbul’s popular mayor, deporting a BBC journalist and imposing a 10-day broadcast ban on an opposition TV channel.<\/p>\n
The moves came after police detained 11 Turkish journalists, including an AFP photographer, who were covering the worst street protests to hit Turkey since 2013.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The protests erupted on March 19 after the arrest and subsequent jailing of Istanbul mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s biggest political rival.<\/p>\n
Defying a protest ban, vast crowds have hit the streets daily, with the nightly rallies often descending into running battles with riot police, whose crackdowns have drawn international condemnation.<\/p>\n
Earlier on Thursday, Turkey deported a BBC journalist covering the protests on grounds he posed “a threat to public order”, the British broadcaster said.<\/p>\n
Mark Lowen was taken from his Istanbul hotel on Wednesday and detained for 17 hours before being deported in what BBC News CEO Deborah Turness called “an extremely troubling incident”.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
So far, more than 1,879 people have been detained since March 19, Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya said Thursday.<\/p>\n
By 1400 GMT, 10 of the 11 detained Turkish journalists had been freed.<\/p>\n
AFP’s Yasin Akgul, the last one, was released later in the day.<\/p>\n
Broadcast Ban For Opposition TV<\/strong><\/p>\n Also Thursday, Turkey’s broadcasting watchdog RTUK imposed a 10-day broadcast ban on opposition TV channel Sozcu, citing alleged incitement to “hatred and hostility” in its coverage of the protests.<\/p>\n “The broadcaster… was given a 10-day broadcast suspension,” RTUK said, warning that if it was found guilty of further “violations” after the ban expired, its licence would be revoked.<\/p>\n During a series of pre-dawn raids on Monday, police detained 11 journalists, eight in Istanbul and three in Izmir.<\/p>\n A day later, an Istanbul court remanded AFP’s Akgul, 35, and six others in custody for “taking part in illegal rallies and marches”.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The move sparked condemnations from rights groups and the Paris-based international news agency.<\/p>\n But the court on Thursday ordered their release, the MLSA rights group said. Turkey’s Journalists’ Union said the other four had also been freed.<\/p>\n Despite the move, Akgul’s lawyer told AFP the charges against him had “not been dropped”.<\/p>\n AFP chairman Fabrice Fries had condemned Akgul’s jailing as “unacceptable”, demanding he be swiftly freed as he was “not part of the protest” and only covering it as a journalist.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n ‘A Monumental Injustice’\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n “Yasin Akgul’s release is welcome and constitutes redress for a monumental injustice,” Erol Onderoglu of media watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) told AFP on Thursday.<\/p>\n The arrests had sparked international condemnation, including from the United Nations.<\/p>\n Of the nearly 1,900 people detained since March 19, Yerlikaya said 260 had been remanded in custody, 468 granted conditional release, 489 freed and another 662 cases were still being processed.<\/p>\n He said 150 police officers had been hurt in the protests after being “attacked with sticks, stones, acid, axes and Molotov cocktails”.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Meeting the international press in Istanbul, Justice Minister Yilmaz Tunc said the justice system was independent and impartial, insisting that Turkey was “a state of law”.<\/p>\n He rejected any claim that Imamoglu’s arrest was “political”.<\/p>\n Major Protest Saturday<\/strong><\/p>\n Medical students and a handful of lecturers hit the streets of the capital Ankara again Thursday, many with their faces covered to avoid being identified by the police.<\/p>\n Students in Istanbul organised a protest march at 6:30 pm (1530 GMT) through Sisli, a district whose CHP mayor was also arrested and jailed in the police operation last week that netted Imamoglu.<\/p>\n On Wednesday, the Istanbul city council elected Nuri Aslan as interim mayor to try to head off the threat of the government naming its own trustee to run Turkey’s economic powerhouse.<\/p>\n The main opposition CHP, which has staged mass rallies outside City Hall for the first seven nights after Imamoglu’s arrest, has called for a major gathering on Saturday.<\/p>\n Erdogan has repeatedly denounced the protests as “street terror” and stepped up his attacks on the CHP and its leader Ozgur Ozel.<\/p>\n (Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)<\/i><\/p>\n Istanbul: Turkey on Thursday stepped up a crackdown on media coverage of mass protests since the arrest of Istanbul’s popular mayor, deporting a BBC journalist and imposing a 10-day broadcast ban on an opposition TV channel. The moves came after police detained 11 Turkish journalists, including an AFP photographer, who were covering the worst street […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1037,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1036","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gunnewsusa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1036","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gunnewsusa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gunnewsusa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gunnewsusa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gunnewsusa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1036"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gunnewsusa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1036\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1038,"href":"https:\/\/gunnewsusa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1036\/revisions\/1038"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gunnewsusa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1037"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gunnewsusa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gunnewsusa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gunnewsusa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n \n <\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"