Turkey orders trial for opposition paper staff

Turkish authorities have ordered that the editor and senior staff of a leading opposition newspaper be arrested pending trial, as more pro-Kurdish officials were detained.Police fired tear gas and water cannon on a crowd of around 1,000 protesters in central Istanbul who were trying to get to the offices of the secularist Cumhuriyet newspaper.Nine of its journalists and executives were detained on Monday.Prosecutors said staff at the paper were suspected of crimes committed on behalf of Kurdish militants and US-based cleric Fethullah Gulen, who is accused of instigating a coup attempt.Since the failed coup in July, more than 110,000 judges, teachers, police and civil servants have been detained or suspended.“The international community is outraged.” the head of the main opposition party, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, said. “What has the Cumhuriyet newspaper done? Have they planted bombs somewhere?”Yesterday, authorities appointed a new mayor to Sirnak municipality, part of a campaign over recent weeks of replacing pro-Kurdish officials in the mostly Kurdish southeast.A bomb in Sirnak province yesterday killed two children and wounded four, an attack that the local governor’s office blamed on the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).On Friday, the co-leaders of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) were jailed pending trial and several others were arrested.President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has accused Turkey’s third-largest party of links to the PKK which has carried out an insurgency for three decades.The HDP denies that and says it is working for a peaceful resolution of the conflict.Prime Minister Binali Yildirim has said the HDP lawmakers were detained after refusing to give testimony in a probe linked to “terrorist propaganda”.One HDP member of parliament detained on Friday and then released said the party had no intention of co-operating.“You will have to keep waiting if you expect us to show our necks like sheep at a butcher’s,” Sirri Sureyya Onder was quoted as saying by the Dogan news agency. “We will not be instruments in your false legal actions.”Hours after Friday’s detentions, a car bomb killed 11 people and wounded more than 100 near a police station in the southeastern city of Diyarbakir where some HDP lawmakers were being held.Islamic State (IS) claimed responsibility for the attack, the  militant group’s Amaq news agency said.The US-based SITE Intelligence Group cited an “insider source” for the Amaq news agency as saying “fighters from the Islamic State detonated an explosives-laden vehicle parked in front of a Turkish police headquarters in Diyarbakir in southeastern Turkey”.But the Diyarbakir governor’s office said the bomb was the work of the PKK, citing intercepted communications between Kurish militants.It said that the three tonnes of explosives used in the bombing were activated by a PKK operative with the codename “Kemal”.“This information clearly shows that the attack was carried out by the separatist terror organisation,” it said, using the customary official phrase for the PKK.Some 170 newspapers, magazines, TV stations and news agencies have been closed in the crackdown, leaving 2,500 journalists unemployed, Turkey’s journalists’ association said.Cumhuriyet’s previous editor, Can Dundar, was jailed last year for publishing state secrets.He was later released and is now overseas to avoid arrest.