A Turkish prosecutor has drafted an indictment for Doğan Akın, the editor and founder of the T24 news website, for his reporting on a government whistleblower’s tweets between 2014 and 2016, seeking up to 15 years in prison, T24 said.
Akın faces terrorism-related charges for covering 108 tweets of Fuat Avni, an anonymous whistleblower who famously provided inside information from within President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s inner circle.
The prosecutor accused Akın of deliberately aiding and abetting a terrorist organization despite not being a member of it.
Back in August the news website had reported on an investigation launched into a number of Turkish news websites for reporting on Fuat Avni’s tweets.
The well-known Twitter user provided information on corruption within the government as well as unlawful actions by authorities and was followed by nearly 3 million people.
Turkey was ranked 157th among 180 countries in the 2018 World Press Freedom Index released in April by Reporters Without Borders (RSF). The country has also been described by the Council of Europe and a number of human rights groups as the largest jailer of journalists in the world.
