Turkish court convicts German reporter

ISTANBUL — A Turkish court convicted a correspondent for Germany’s Die Welt newspaper Thursday of engaging in propaganda in favor of Kurdish rebels and sentenced him in absentia to more than two years and nine months in prison.

However, the court acquitted German-Turkish journalist Deniz Yucel of charges of sedition and propagandizing for the network of a Turkish cleric whom Ankara accuses of masterminding a failed military coup in Turkey four years ago.

The court also called for two new criminal investigations of Yucel for alleged insults to Turkey and its president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Yucel was arrested in Istanbul as part of a vast government clampdown in the wake of the July 2016 coup attempt and charged with propaganda on behalf of terror groups, including the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK. He was held in pretrial detention for a year and has since returned to Germany.

His case led to a diplomatic crisis with Germany, which accused Turkey of conducting “arbitrary arrests” of German citizens suspected of links to the PKK or the network led by U.S.-based cleric Fethullah Gulen.

“This is a political verdict, just as the whole story of my arrest was politically motivated,” Yucel wrote in an article published on Die Welt’s website shortly after the ruling. He said the decision once again illustrated the “miserable” state of the rule of law in Turkey.