Journalist serving life gets 5 more years

A TURKISH court handed an additional jail term to journalist Ahmet Altan for terrorism charges on Wednesday, state media said, two weeks after he was sentenced to life in prison in a case that has drawn international censure of Ankara.

Altan, his brother and four other journalists were sentenced this month for aiding plotters of a 2016 failed coup, charges they deny. The Altan brothers were accused of giving coded messages on a television talk show a day before the coup attempt.

On Wednesday, a court sentenced Altan to a total of five years and 11 months on two different charges related to an article he wrote for the Haberdar news website, the state-run Anadolu news agency said.

The court ruled the language he used to describe the Kurdish conflict in south-east Turkey, where he wrote of “children” digging trenches to fight Turkish soldiers, attempted to portray the actions of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) as innocent, Anadolu said.

The PKK, considered a terrorist organisation by the United States, the European Union and Turkey, has waged a three-decade insurgency in the south-east.

The court also ruled the same article had insulted Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Anadolu said. Insulting the president is a crime in Turkey.

The verdict drew criticism from rights groups and international bodies, including the United Nations. Hours after it was announced, Britain’s Guardian newspaper published an open letter signed by 38 Nobel laureates, including Kazuo Ishiguro and JM Coetzee, addressed to Mr Erdoğan. It described the evidence against the Altan brothers and the four others who were sentenced to life as “insubstantial”.

Altan, a well-known journalist and author who had previously been editor of the now-defunct liberal newspaper Taraf, was detained for some 17 months before his life sentence was handed down this month.

“We will spend the rest of our lives alone in a cell that is three metres long and three metres wide. We will be taken out to see sunlight for one hour a day,” he wrote in a New York Times essay published on Wednesday.

“We will never be pardoned and we will die in a prison cell.”