A 19-year-old woman in Turkey’s western province of Uşak was arrested on charges of insulting Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Republic of Turkey, and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the Hürriyet newspaper reported on Thursday.
The young woman, identified in the report only by the initials N.Ş.Ş., was detained as a result of comments on her personal social media accounts that allegedly included insults of Atatürk and Erdoğan.
Following her detention, the woman was arrested and put in pretrial detention on charges of “insulting statesmen and the president.”
Such events have become more frequent in Turkey recently, with another woman arrested back in July on charges of insulting Atatürk in a video she recorded at his mausoleum and a 21-year-old university student arrested last Sunday for allegedly insulting Atatürk during the commemoration of the 80th anniversary of his death.
Most notably, a woman in Tekirdağ was detained and released on probation this week for attacking a monument of Atatürk with an axe.
Arrests for insulting Erdoğan, on the other hand, have been commonplace in Turkey over the last several years, with many journalists as well as thousands of ordinary citizens and even some foreign nationals prosecuted for insulting the president.