54 organizations urge once again the Turkish authorities to immediately and unconditionally release news editor, reporter and poet Nedim Türfent, and to overturn his conviction. Today marks 2000 days since he was arrested and subsequently sentenced to eight years and nine months in prison on trumped-up terrorism charges following an unfair trial, during which scores of witnesses said they had been tortured into testifying against him.
A news editor and reporter at the now-closed pro-Kurdish Dicle News Agency (DİHA), Nedim Türfent was detained on 12 May 2016 shortly after reporting on Turkish special police forces’ ill-treatment of Kurdish workers. Soon after his video footage was released, Türfent began receiving death threats from the police and was the target of an online harassment campaign. He was formally charged with ‘membership of a terrorist organisation’ one day after his arrest; the indictment was first produced 10 months later. He spent almost two years in solitary confinement in harrowing detention conditions.
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