Former Turkish president Gül's Twitter account hacked

ISTANBUL

More than six million followers of Turkey's former president Abdullah Gül saw a series of nationalist messages on his Twitter account after it was hacked on April 4.

Anonymous hackers who seized the verified account, @cbabdullahgul, posted Pan-Turkist messages, while also criticizing political Islam.

Gül, one of the founders of Turkey's Justice and Development Party (AKP), is the second most popular Turkish Twitter user, following comedian Cem Yılmaz, whose account has almost nine million followers.

Gül had stepped in to end Turkey's Twitter ban in March 2014, saying in a tweet that the government's shutdown of social media "cannot be approved."

"He is one of the few politicians in tune with the dynamics of social media, not refraining from using an informal tone," the Hürriyet Daily News reporter Emrah Güler had said about Gül when he evaluated last year's developments on Twitter in Turkey.