"The shame of justice", this is the title of the Turkish daily newspaper of the Turkish opposition Cumhuriyet after yesterday evening 13 of the 18 journalists and employees were sentenced by the court of Silivri, where the super prison of Istanbul rises, with the accusation of "supporting terrorist organization without being a member".
The journalists were accused of having links to the network of Fetullah Gulen, considered the mind of the failed coup on July 15, 2016.
Only one of the defendants presented himself in the detained classroom, the president of the newspaper Akin Atalay; released this night after 541 days of detention he called himself "a hostage", speaking of a real "ransom to buy Cumhuriyet" to change his own register of true newspaper.
Among the condemned, who do not have to go to the cell waiting for the sentence of second degree, the director Murat Sabuncu, released last March after 434 days in prison, that at the end of the very long hearing declared that "no penalty can stop Cumhuriyet, who will continue to inform, even from inside a cell "to then define the sentence" a spot for all of Turkey ".
Sentenced to seven and a half years in prison, the investigative journalist Ahmet Sik, already in prison in 2011 for a book that revealed the infiltration of Fetullah Gulen in the country in 2011, and now accused of links with the Kurdish separatists of the PKK.
Sentenced to three and a half years for the cartoonist Musa Kart, two and a half years for the journalist Kadri Gursel, a veteran of information in the country. The former director Can Dundar, now in Germany and condemned in another trial at five years and 10 months, and journalists Ilhan Tanir and Turhan Gunay, are exempt from the convictions of first instance.