The media regulatory body in Turkey has suspended the broadcasting license of an opposition TV channel for a week due to some comments about the imprisoned Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan, reports France-Presse, citing Agerpres.

Tele 1 anchor Merdan Yanardag was arrested on June 27 on charges of making live comments that could be classified as “terrorist propaganda” and that he “apologized to criminals.”

Merdan Yanardag asked the station why Abdullah Ocalan – a leading figure in the Kurdish insurgency in Turkey – is still in solitary confinement in a prison on an island in the Sea of ​​Marmara.

He was arrested just hours after these remarks and charged the very next day.

The leader of the PKK, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, considered a “terrorist” by Ankara and its Western allies, Abdullah Ocalan, 74, was arrested on 15 February 1999 and sentenced to death in Turkey on 29 June 1999 for treason and attempted separatism. country.

However, in 2002, after the death penalty was abolished, his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.

Turkey is one of the last countries in the world in terms of press freedom

Tele 1 is one of four opposition TV channels fined by the regulatory body for covering the presidential election campaign in May.

On Thursday, the media regulatory body fined Tele 1 5% of advertising revenue for the month of June.

Reporters sans Frontieres found that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who was re-elected for a five-year term on May 28, received 60 times more airtime than the opposition during the election campaign.

Turkey was downgraded from 149th place in 2022 to 165th place in 2023 in RSF’s press freedom ranking out of 180 countries analyzed.