Former Zaman journalist Tuncer Çetinkaya has been taken into custody again two days after he was released from an-eight-month-long imprisonment.
Zaman’s former local news representative in the southern province of Antalya, Çetinkaya was put in pre-trial detention on July 27, 2016 as part of the government’s post-coup crackdown against critics.
He was released under judicial supervision along with six other local reporters on March 30.
While the details have yet to emerge, Çetinkaya was detained again on Saturday, according to a local news outlet.
On Saturday Turkey attracted the attention of international journalism organizations after 21 journalists who had been in pre-trial detention for eight months and were to be released pending trial in İstanbul on Friday were arrested again early on Saturday without ever having been freed.
The number of journalists jailed in Turkey has reached 228, a new world record, as the massive crackdown on the free, independent and critical media by the authoritarian regime of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan shows no sign of abating any time soon, the Stockholm Center for Freedom (SCF), a Stockholm-based monitoring and rights advocacy group, reported on Saturday. (Turkey Purge)