Turkiye detains journalist who revealed 'hacking of government websites' 

Turkiye yesterday jailed a journalist pending trial after he announced hackers had stolen personal information from government websites and shared some of it with him, including President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ID card, Reuters reported his lawyer saying.

The independent journalist, Ibrahim Haskologlu, posted the announcement on Twitter, illustrating it with a partially obscured photo of what he said was Erdogan’s ID.

His lawyer, Emrah Karatay, said his client was arrested on a charge of illegally obtaining and disseminating personal information due to his social media posts.

In his Twitter posts last week, Haskologlu said that a group of hackers had contacted him two months ago and told him that they had obtained Turks’ personal information from government websites.

As well as sharing the purported photo of Erdogan’s ID, Haskologlu also published an image of what he said was the ID card of Hakan Fidan, head of Turkiye’s National Intelligence Agency. Most of the information on the cards was concealed.

READ: Turkey launches probe into Facebook over data leak

“The reason for his formal arrest was that he did not notify prosecutors,” Karatay said, adding that Haskologlu had warned various authorities but no action was taken.

“He thought he had to warn people as a journalist and posted these. Now he’s arrested – that’s all,” Karatay said, adding that police searched Haskologlu’s house when they detained him last night.

Istanbul police was not immediately available for comment.

Broadcaster NTV said the interior ministry had filed a complaint about Haskologlu after his posts, prompting an investigation by the Istanbul prosecutor’s office.

Turkiye is one of the world’s leading jailers of journalists and ranked 154th out of 180 countries in Reporters Without Borders (RSF)’s 2020 World Press Freedom Index.