Deniz Yücel, a Turkish-German journalist for the German Die Welt daily, has told a group of opposition deputies who visited him in prison that the reason for his arrest is not his social media messages but his reports in Die Welt.
Yücel, who was detained in Turkey on Feb. 14 as part of an investigation for publishing stories on the leaked emails of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s son-in-law and Energy Minister Berat Albayrak, was arrested by a court on Feb. 27 and sent to Silivri Prison.
Republican People’s Party (CHP) deputies Sezgin Tanrıkulu and Utku Çakırözer recently visited some of the journalists who are jailed in Silivri Prison, among them Yücel.
According to a news report on the T24 news website on Tuesday, Yücel told the CHP deputies that contrary to what is suggested in the media, he was not jailed because of his social media messages but due to the reports he wrote for Die Welt. Yücel also said there were mistakes in the translations of his news reports, which were added to his dossier as evidence of a crime by the prosecutor’s office, and that although he mentioned this in court, his objections were not taken into consideration by the judge.