Prosecutor drops charges against journalist in Erdoğan insult investigation

A prosecutor dropped charges on Thursday against Can Dündar, a leading Turkish journalist and editor-in-chief of the Cumhuriyet daily, in an investigation where he was accused of insulting President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in an interview he carried out, Today's Zaman reports.

According to the prosecutor in charge of the investigation, the elements of the crime of insult are not present.

Last week Dündar was summoned by the same prosecutor to give his testimony on the charge of insulting Erdoğan, after a lawyer for the president filed a complaint over an interview Dündar had with a prosecutor who oversaw a corruption probe that implicated members of Erdoğan's inner circle.
The lawyer representing Erdoğan demanded a prison term of up to nine years and four months for the journalist.

Dündar recently published an interview with prosecutor Celal Kara, who oversaw the corruption probe that implicated four ministers as well as politicians and businessmen close to Erdoğan and which went public with a wave of detentions beginning on Dec. 17, 2013. Kara was removed from the case and later suspended from duty. The new prosecutors assigned to the case then dropped the charges against the suspects.

Erdoğan's lawyer argued in his complaint against Dündar that the journalist, in light of his columns about Erdoğan, did not aim to just report the interview, but leveled accusations against Erdoğan in violation of his personal rights. In the interview with Kara, the lawyer said, Dündar attempted to portray Erdoğan as the leader of a criminal organization. He thus went beyond the limits of the media's right to freedom of speech and became an “accomplice” to a crime, said the lawyer, arguing that Kara's remarks in the interview proved that the Dec. 17 investigation was actually an attempt to overthrow the government, as the president has claimed.

In his lengthy interview published in Cumhuriyet, Kara said then-Prime Minister Erdoğan was the person behind the scenes who knew and approved of a series of corrupt dealings between several ministers and Iranian businessman Reza Zarrab, who was a prime suspect in the investigation.