A 76-year-old Turkish actor is facing charges of insulting the president for referring to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan as a “thief” in a tweet he posted in 2016, the Sol Haber news website reported.
Orhan Aydın, an outspoken critic of the Turkish government, is being investigated nearly eight years after posting the tweet.
In his tweet in April 2016, Aydın commented about a news story from Sol Haber that talked about the use of a song as background music in a short film that featured a poem recited by Erdoğan without permission from the song’s composer.
Aydın reposted the story and tweeted, “Thief,” an implicit reference to Erdoğan due to the use of the song without permission.
The short film, shot by Palestinian director Ammar Tilavi, is about the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem in which Erdoğan, who is known as a strong supporter of the Palestinian cause, reads a poem about the liberation of the mosque and Jerusalem from the Israeli occupation.
In an interview with Sol Haber in 2016, Metin Kahraman, the composer of the song used in the film, said he was not asked for permission for the use of his song in the film and would take legal action against it.
Meanwhile, Aydın said in his testimony to prosecutors that his remark should be considered within the limits of freedom of expression. He said he has been campaigning for years to defend the rights of artists and felt the need to speak up against the copyright infringement in the film.
Thousands of people in the country are under investigation, with most of them under threat of imprisonment, over alleged insults of Erdoğan. Whoever insults the president can face up to four years in prison, a sentence that can be increased if the crime was committed through the mass media.
Aydın lost his daughter in powerful earthquakes that hit the country’s south in February 2023, killing more than 50,000 people. He has held the government responsible for the death of his daughter, whose body was retrieved from rubble 36 hours later.