Aysenur Parildak, Zaman
Medium:Print
Charge:Anti-State
Imprisoned:August 3-6, 2016

Ankara's First Court of Penal Peace on August 11, 2016, ordered Aysenur Parildak, a former court reporter in Ankara for the shuttered daily newspaper Zaman, jailed pending trial, according to the pro-government daily newspaper Sabah, citing the state-run Anadolu Agency (AA).

News reports did not specify the charges the journalist faces, but a court ordered Zaman's parent company put under the trusteeship of figures selected by the government in March 2016 on the grounds that it was linked to followers of exiled preacher Fethullah Gülen. The government accuses Gülen of maintaining a terrorist organization and parallel state structure within Turkey that it subsequently blamed for orchestrating a failed military coup attempt on July 15, 2016. The government used emergency powers it assumed after that coup attempt to order Zaman closed by government decree, and CPJ research shows that police have charged other Zaman journalists with terrorism-related offenses because of their work for the newspaper, which the government considered a mouthpiece for the Gülenist network.

News reports also differed as to the date police detained the journalist. The pro-government news website En Son Haber reported that police detained Parildak on August 6, 2016. The pro-opposition daily newspaper Cumhuriyet reported that police detained her on August 3.

In a letter she sent to Cumhuriyet from prison, which the newspaper published on October 4, 2016, Parildak said she had been unemployed since government-appointed trustees took control of Zaman and that police interrogated her about her former employment at the newspaper and about her activity on Twitter. Parildak in her letter to Cumhuriyet also said that police had told her that an informant had told them that she was planning to escape the country.

In her letter to Cumhuriyet, Parildak alleged that jailors beat and sexually harassed her and other female inmates in custody. "I was questioned for eight days, day and night. They [the police] were drunk as they were questioning me, and they were not afraid to say so openly. Then, the court [hearing took place], and here I am," she wrote.

In her letter, Parildak also said she had spent 20 days sharing a cell with other prisoners, before she was moved to a smaller cell. "It means solitary confinement," she wrote. "I fear I will be forgotten here."

According to an October 6, 2016, En Son Haber report, the Justice Ministry denied the journalist's claims. En Son Haber reported that Parildak was being held at Ankara Women's Prison. The ministry told En Son Haber that the journalist is in a cell with two other inmates, and that she had not been beaten or harassed.

The daily newspaper Yeni Safak on December 1, 2016, reported that prosecutors had asked Ankara's 14th Court for Serious Crimes to indict the journalist on the charge of "being member of a [terrorist] organization."

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