Cumhuriyet staff demand indictment as soon as possible, say they have no access to books to read

The arrested staff of daily Cumhuriyet have demanded that their indictment be prepared as soon as possible in the hopes that they can be tried without arrest, said opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) lawmaker Utku Çakırözer, who visited the journalists in Istanbul's Silivri jail, the daily reported Nov. 25. 

Conveying their message via Çakırözer, the Cumhuriyet staff, including writers, its cartoonist and executive team members, harshly objected to their custody, saying their indictments should be ready as soon as possible and that they should be tried without arrest. 

Turhan Günay, Kadri Gürsel, Önder Çelik, Musa Kart, Murat Sabuncu, Güray Öz, Bülent Utku, M. Kemal Güngör, Hakan Kara and Akın Atalay were arrested after a major operation on Oct. 31 on charges of "acting on behalf of terror organizations without being a member to them," for their columns and news stories published in the daily. The "terror" organizations that were referred in charges were the Gülensit organization, which is widely believed to be behind the July 15 coup attempt in Turkey, and the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).

"Our priority expectation is that the indictment be ready as soon as possible. I am also concerned about relations with Europe. Turkey will not be able to overcome this severing of ties. One thing that caused this separation was the fact that journalists are jailed. Turkey should fix this problem. I have anti-coup tweets posted on the night of the coup attempt. Despite this, I am the one who has been arrested. This is a big contradiction," the daily's editor-in-chief, Murat Sabuncu, told Çakırözer, adding that he valued the reaction of Turkish women to a recently proposed - but subsequently withdrawn - bill that would have legitimized...