Fatih Tezcan, a pro-government journalist with 435,000 followers on Twitter, has targeted Hasan Cücük, a former Zaman daily reporter in Copenhagen, and threatened to reveal his address in order to enable his followers to take the revenge for the deaths of 246 people in a failed coup attempt in Turkey on July 15.
Tezcan targeted the former Zaman reporter after Cücük tweeted a list of police officers, prison guards and prisons in Turkey for which he received reports of brutal torture being committed on people who were detained over links to the Gülen movement, which the government accuses of masterminding the failed coup attempt.
“Is there no one to do something to the terrorist [meaning Cücük] who slanders police officers fighting against FETÖ,” Tezcan wrote on his Twitter account on Sunday.
FETÖ is a derogatory term and acronym for the Fethullahist Terrori Organization, coined by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government to refer to the Gülen movement.
He also threatened to release Cücük’s address abroad and said, “These lies will not save you when an army of volunteers comes there to take revenge for the 246 people you killed [on July 15].”
Meanwhile, pro-government media organizations, including the state-owned Anadolu news agency, published stories about former Zaman Editor-in-Chief Ekrem Dumanlı, claiming that he was seen in a shopping mall along with his family in the US.
Responding to the stories and messages against him on Twitter, Dumanlı said he is being targeted by pro-gov’t media and people on Twitter calling him a member of a terrorist organization.
Dumanlı wrote the following tweets in response to the accusations and reports in the pro-gov’t media, saying,:“Those calling me and any other person who is against violence a member of a terrorist organization are liars.”
“The news about me being ‘seen here/there’ are an effort to create a treacherous perception. Of course I am not living in space, traveling through different countries of the world.”
“Those who pretend there is still justice in Turkey and calling me to account [before the courts] must first face their own accounting.”
“Those who transformed Turkey into a torture center don’t know that their accusations [against him and other Gülen sympathizers] are not credible in the world. Who believes the accusations you fabricated!”