A female Turkish journalist has lost custody of her children after she was convicted for uploading a video related to the 2014 controversy over Turkey’s intelligence services allegedly transferring weapons to Syrian rebels. Arzu Yildiz was sentenced to 20 months in jail and lost her parental rights after exposing a video related to a weapons-smuggling scandal denied by the Turkish government. Her lawyer said it was “an act of revenge” by the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan. RT reports: The journalist’s sentence is related to a 2014 incident in which prosecutors uncovered trucks belonging to MIT, Turkey’s national security agency, smuggling weapons for rebels across the border to Syria. President Erdogan has insisted that the vehicles were carrying humanitarian aid and accused the prosecutors of “treason and espionage,” as well as of being agents of his US-based nemesis Fethullah Gulen. The prosecutors were arrested and put on trial before a closed court, before being sentenced to prison terms. Yildiz obtained video of the proceedings, however, and posted the prosecutors’ testimonies, which contradicted the government’s claims, on YouTube. She was later charged with breaching court confidentiality. She has insisted throughout that she was not the only one to publish the videos [...]
