Turkey detains editor, staff of leading opposition paper
Opposition newspaper Cumhuriyet was raided this morning and several senior staff members were arrested as part of what the government called a "terrorism probe" into some of its shareholders.
“An accelerated descent into dictatorship” was how one journalist summed up the Oct. 31 raid on Cumhuriyet, one of a handful of surviving opposition outlets, which saw its editor-in-chief Murat Sabuncu detained along with several senior editors on alleged terror charges in Istanbul.
Those arrested at dawn this morning included cartoonist Musa Kart, veteran columnist Aydin Engin, chief financial officer Gunseli Ozaltay and editorial board member and columnist Kadri Gursel, who also writes for Al-Monitor.
Government spokesman Numan Kurtulmus insisted that the detentions did not target the paper's editorial staff but were linked to a probe into some of its shareholders.
In Ankara, hundreds of people gathered outside the newspaper’s offices to protest the detentions, part of an ever-widening crackdown on alleged colluders in the July coup attempt.
