Daily Cumhuriyet awarded for Charlie Hebdo, intel trucks stories

ISTANBUL – Doğan News Agency

AFP photo

Daily Cumhuriyet has been awarded by a corruption watchdog organization for its reporting on purportedly state-owned trucks carrying weapons to militants fighting in Syria as well as its story on the Charlie Hebdo attack.

Marking Anti-Corruption Day on Dec. 9, Cumhuriyet was awarded by Transparency International, an international organization fighting corruption, in the first Transparency Awards this year on Dec. 10, for its report published in early 2014 on trucks, which were allegedly owned by the Turkish National Intelligence Organization (MİT), carrying weapons to Syria. 

The Media Corporate Award was presented to Cumhuriyet columnist Doğan Satmış for the daily's “accurate follow-up and publishing on corruption cases, stories about the state-owned trucks carrying weapons to Syria and the aftermath of the attack on the French magazine Charlie Hebdo.”

“I am honored to get this award on behalf of Can Dündar and Erdem Gül, who were imprisoned for reporting, for doing their job,” Satmış said during the ceremony.

Cumhuriyet Editor-in-Chief Dündar and Ankara bureau chief Gül were arrested on Nov. 26 on charges of “aiding an armed terrorist organization” and “committing political or military espionage” over reports in Cumhuriyet on the interception of the allegedly MİT-owned trucks. The articles claimed the trucks intercepted in January 2014 were shipping weapons to jihadist groups fighting across the border in Syria.

The imprisonment of Dündar and Gül created an outcry both inside and outside Turkey, with leading international press organizations submitting an alert on the state of freedom of media in Turkey to the Council of Europe on Nov. 26.