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12 November 2019A court in Istanbul issued a new arrest warrant for Ahmet Altan, the well-known Turkish journalist and writer released last week after more than three years in prison on charges of supporting the failed coup of 2016. The judges upheld the appeal of attorney general against his release. Anadolu reports it.
The arrest warrant is currently not yet executed. According to local media reports, Altan should be detained in the next few hours. The 69-year-old journalist, one of the most influential intellectuals in Turkey, had been released from prison along with another veteran reporter, Nazli Ilicak.
An appellate court in Istanbul had sentenced them to 10 and a half and 8 years and 9 months in prison, respectively, on charges of having subliminally claimed in a TV broadcast the attempt to putsch, attributed to Fethullah's network Gulen. At the same time, the court had established their release under judicial control and with a ban on expatriation in light of the sentence already served and awaiting the final sentence of the Cassation, which in the past had already canceled a life sentence against them.
Their case is considered among the most important in the crackdown imposed by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan after the attempted coup, which led to tens of thousands of arrests and purges from public administrations.