Amid the Turkish media’s self-censorship over the leaked emails of energy minister and President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s son-in-law Berat Albayrak, the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) inquired in Parliament about emails Redhack and Wikileaks published that reveal several scandals, confirming the first family’s impact on a wide range of issues from government-media relations to alleged involvement in the import of Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) oil from northern Iraq.
HDP Gaziantep deputy Mahmut Toğrul submitted a question in Parliament on Thursday asking Albayrak for an explanation about the emails, which were first revealed by Turkish hacker group Redhack in September.
Toğrul asked Albayrak about his contradictory stance on nuclear energy since as a minister he defends it while in his Ph.D. dissertation Albayrak discussed the dangers of nuclear energy. However, the leaked personal emails of Energy Minister Albayrak have revealed that Albayrak did not write his Ph.D. dissertation, but that a professor named Erişah Arıcan did. The same professor was later promoted.
The Turkish media largely ignored the leaked emails of Albayrak given heavy pressure on independent reporting in the country. In September, RedHack’s social media accounts were blocked after the group hacked Albayrak’s email account.
Some of the huge number of archived mails reveal the profiling of Gülen movement sympathizers by Albayrak’s friends.
Several other emails had revealed in September the close relationship between Erdoğan’s government and the Doğan Media Group, which runs a number of media outlets, including newspapers and TV stations.