"Inciting the People": The Indictment against Deniz Yücel
The Istanbul public prosecutor's office has brought charges against Welt correspondent Deniz Yücel. Yücel was released from pre-trial detention in Turkey. However, the 32nd Criminal Court in Istanbul has accepted the indictment, which is only three pages long.
This is dated February 13 and is available to the news agency DPA. This results in proceedings against Yücel.
In the indictment, Yücel is accused of "propaganda for a terrorist organization" and "inciting the people to hatred and hostility". Yücel had "written several articles in German that constitute a criminal offense". His texts were translated as part of the investigation. According to the indictment, the terrorist organizations in question are the banned Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK) and the movement of the US-based preacher Fethullah Gülen. The government holds the Gülen movement responsible for the attempted coup in July 2016.
The indictment lists eight articles that the correspondent published between June 19, 2016 and December 12, 2016 in the World as evidence for the accusations. In this context, the public prosecutor's office accuses Yücel, among other things, of describing operations by the security forces against the PKK as "ethnic cleansing". In an interview with PKK commander Cemil Bayik, Yücel tried to portray the PKK as a "legitimate and political organization".
In connection with the Gülen movement, the public prosecutor's office accuses Yücel of, among other things, writing "putschist" above a photo of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in one of his articles. The accusation of "inciting the people to hatred and hostility" is based on the fact that Yücel wrote about a "genocide against the Armenians", among other things. A joke about Kurds and Turks from an article also serves as evidence.
The prosecution cites a book written by Fethullah Gülen, which the police seized during a house search, as evidence of Yücel's links to terrorist organizations. In addition, after analyzing his telephone data, the prosecution uses as evidence that between 2014 and 2017 Yücel spoke on the phone with 59 different people who, according to the police, were members of the PKK or had links to it. (SDA)
