CHP deputy: More people under arrest for tweeting than links to ISIL

MALATYA - Anadolu Agency

Cihan Photo

Reiterating charges against the caretaker government of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) over their intelligence and security failure leading up to the Oct. 10 double suicide bombing attack which killed at least 102 people in the capital city of Ankara, the deputy chair of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) has suggested more people were imprisoned for tweeting in Turkey than those who have been imprisoned due to their suspected links with the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

“Today, the number of those who are in prisons in Turkey for tweeting is more than those who are under arrest because of [their suspected links with] ISIL,” CHP deputy chair Sezgin Tanrıkulu said late on Oct. 17, during a visit to the eastern province of Malatya.

Tanrıkulu and a group of CHP deputies were in Malatya to attend the funeral ceremony of Ata Önder Atabay, a teacher wounded in the Ankara bombings who succumbed to his injuries in hospital on Oct. 16.

“Arresting and chasing everybody is easy but it is not easy only to chase, arrest and investigate ISIL which is at [President] Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s and the AKP’s doorstep. If there weren’t this protection, this massacre would not have happened,” Tanrıkulu said.

Meanwhile, Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) co-chair Figen Yüksekdağ claimed the Twitter accounts, which had shared the news of an impending bomb blast one day before the twin suicide bombing in Ankara on Oct. 10, were actually controlled by Turkey’s National Intelligence Agency (MİT). 

“From fake social media accounts, they have tried to project that HDP members were people who had knowledge about and responsibility for this massacre. The latest research has shown that they are MİT accounts, Twitter accounts that are used by and oriented by the MİT,” said Yüksekdağ on Oct. 18, in the southeastern province of Gaziantep.