3 Sputnik employees in Turkey detained - UPDATE: Journalists questioned & cleared by prosecutors, OSCE condemns incident

RT
Sat, 29 Feb 2020 01:08 UTC

© Sputnik / Alexandr Kryazhev

Groups of people descended on homes of three Russia's Sputnik agency staffers in Ankara, Turkey, chanting "Turkey for the Turks" and accusing journalists of treason for working for Moscow, RT Editor-in-Chief reported on Twitter.

What appears to be a coordinated attack on Sputnik employees in the Turkish capital was first reported by Margarita Simonyan, RT and Sputnik's Editor-in-Chief on Saturday, and later confirmed by the agency itself.

Simonyan tweeted that three separate groups, each numbering about 10 hooligans, swooped on the flats of three agency's employees, hurling threats and accusing them of betraying their homeland, Turkey, for doing journalistic work for the Russian outlet.

"They were shouting: 'Turkey for the Turks!' 'Traitors!' and 'Russian spies!'", Simonyan tweeted, comparing the raids to the pogroms against ethnic Armenians by Turks in the Ottoman Empire.

"My great-grandmothers would have experienced a déjà vu now."

Simonyan noted that it she was now awaiting a police response to the assaults, adding that it's unclear at the moment how the perpetrators obtained the home addresses of "not the most public of our employees."

The agency has confirmed that unknown miscreants attempted to storm into the apartments belonging to three of its journalists.

Police were called to the scene. However, by the time officers arrived, the attackers were already gone, the agency said. No one has been hurt as result of the incident.

The attack comes at the time of increasing tension between Moscow and Ankara. While partners in the Astana peace process, the two countries have been increasingly at odds over the Syrian army ongoing anti-terrorist offensive in Idlib against armed militants, some of which are backed by Turkey.

The situation has escalated even more after Turkey said that 33 of its troops were killed in a Syrian strike in the last militant stronghold this week, vowing retaliation to Damascus and calling NATO consultations on the issue.

While the US-led military alliance sided with Turkey, scolding both Syria and Russia for the flare-up in Idlib, the block stopped short of pledging any additional military assistance to Ankara, prompting Turkey's Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu to ask the US to redeploy Patriot anti-aircraft missiles on Turkish soil.

Moscow dismissed the accusations, saying that the slain Turkish troops were embedded with terrorists and were not supposed to be in the area at the time of the bombing in the first place. Ankara, despite suffering heavy casualties, refused to withdraw its troops. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Saturday demanded Russia "gets out the way" and lets his armed forces to set scores with the Syrian military one-on-one.

Comment: An update this morning from RT:

Three employees of the Turkish branch of Sputnik News, whose apartments were attacked by Turkish nationalists on Saturday night, have been missing since going to file complaints about the incident to Turkish police.

"We have not been able to contact our employees in Ankara for nine hours now," Margarita Simonyan, the editor-in-chief of RT and Sputnik, said in a tweet on Sunday morning.

Following denials by Turkish police of the whereabouts of these journalists, they were eventually found at Ankara's hall of justice where they were questioned by prosecutors and found to not be involved in any wrongdoing. Turkish media indicated that the reason behind the arrests was an article focused on the Turkish province of Hatay, which has long been disputed by Syria.

Questions arose as to just how these thugs knew of the names and home addresses of these journalists.

Moscow had this to say about the incident:

Moscow said the incident and the suspected detention of the victims by the police constitute a gross attack on the freedom of journalists. "We call on the Turkish authorities to intervene, provide safety to employees of the Russian media and ensure that all circumstances are clarified," the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

The OSCE condemned the harassment of Russian agency journalists in Turkey.

Sputnik parent organization Rossiya Segodnya appealed to the UN, OSCE, and UNESCO to draw their attention to the case.

Harlem Desir, the OSCE representative on freedom of the media, condemned the harassment and suspected detention. "I urge the authorities to ensure the safety of foreign correspondents," he tweeted.

RT provides more detail on the incident:

Shortly after their release, Mahir Boztepe, the head of Sputnik's Turkish branch, was freed from police custody as well. The journalist was briefly detained amid searches of Sputnik's Istanbul office.

The Sputnik employees were released shortly after Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov had a phone call with his Turkish counterpart, Mevlut Cavusoglu. The top diplomat urged Ankara to "swiftly resolve" the situation with the journalists and called upon the authorities to ensure their safety.

The harassment of the Sputnik journalists has been condemned by seven Turkish journalist associations, as well as by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). Harlem Desir, the OSCE representative on freedom of the media, urged Ankara to "ensure the safety of foreign correspondents," and raised concerns over reports linking the detention to a Sputnik article.