A Wall Street Journal reporter was sentenced to two years and one month in prison by a Turkish court that found her guilty of engaging in terrorist propaganda, the newspaper reported Tuesday.
The reporter, Ayla Albayrak, is currently in New York and plans to appeal the Turkish court’s decision. She called the sentence “appalling,” and said it “shouldn’t have come as a surprise to me, but it did.”
Gerard Baker, the Wall Street Journal’s editor-in-chief, slammed both the charges and conviction.
“This was an unfounded criminal charge and wildly inappropriate conviction that wrongly singled out a balanced Wall Street Journal report,” he said. “The sole purpose of the article was to provide objective and independent reporting on events in Turkey, and it succeeded.”
The charges against Albayrak stemmed from an article published Aug. 19, 2015, headlined “Urban Warfare Escalates in Turkey’s Kurdish-Majority Southeast.” The article, as well as a video, focused on a conflict between Turkish security forces and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, a group Turkey, the United States, and the European lists as a terrorist organization.
For the article, Albayrak interviewed the mayor and residents of Silopi, Turkey, where violence had broken out between the two sides, as well as officials with the Turkish government and a member of a youth movement associated with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party.
In November 2015, Albayrak received a written order to go to a local police station in Istanbul. There, the reporter was told she was under investigation for spreading terrorist propaganda in support of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party.
A Turkish prosecutor filed an indictment against her in April 2016. The indictment claimed Albayrak violated the country’s anti-terrorism laws.
Though the Turkish government accused Albayrak of spreading terrorist propaganda, the reporter has maintained in court documents she “provided a balanced and objective view of urban warfare” that impacted parts of southeastern Turkey.
“This decision shows the extent to which the authorities did not want the operations that were going on in Turkey’s southeast to be reported on,” Albayrak said. “It also shows yet again, that the international media is not immune to the ongoing press crackdown in Turkey.”
