Türkiye deportes the BBC correspondent, who covered the mass protests

The BBC said on Thursday that Türkiye deported a correspondent that was covering Anti -government protests In the country, after his arrest and described it as a “threat to public order.”

The broadcaster said in a statement That Mark Lewin, one of his correspondence, was detained in Istanbul where he was covering Protests and political crisis I caught before The arrest of last week from Ekrem ImamogluPresident Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The BBC said Mr. Lewin took from his hotel on Wednesday and held it for 17 hours.

“The detention and deportation of the country, where I lived five years ago, which I had such affection was very sad,” said Mr. Lewin in a statement, after arriving in London on Thursday. “Freedom of the press and neutral reports is essential to any democracy.”

Deborah Tennis, CEO of BBC News, said the broadcaster will communicate with the Turkish authorities.

“No journalist should face this type of treatment just to do their job,” she said, and called for the treatment of Mr. Lewin “very worrying.”

Türkiye did not announce the deportation and Turkish officials did not respond to the request for comment.

Hundreds of thousands of Turks have protested cities throughout the country since the arrest of Mr. Imamoglu on charges of corruption and support for terrorism. As of Wednesday, the country’s Ministry of Interior said that about 170 people were imprisoned while awaiting trial.

Mr. Imamoglu, which was He was removed from his position as mayor A trial was imprisoned suspended on charges of corruption, saying that his detention was a political drive. Critics of Mr. Erdogan said that the moves were the most recent example of this Authoritarian tactics After two decades.

Mr. Lewin, a well -known correspondent who had previously lived in Türkiye for five years, was not the only journalist who took place in the campaign. Of more than 1,300 people, the Ministry of Interior said they have been arrested regarding the protests, 11 journalists. Seven of the detained correspondents, including a photographer for Agence-Press at the French News Agency, were released without charge on Thursday.

Activists in the field of human rights and media experts said that the treatment of Mr. Lewin and other correspondents was a sharp escalation of government efforts to suppress or intimidate the independent press.

“The sources of reliable and wonderful international media have not been targeted in recent years,” said Emma Senkler Web, Türkiye’s director of Human Rights Watch.

“This represents a great exit,” she said, adding that the campaign was part of a “large -scale assault on democracy.”

Emery Kezelkaya, a Turkish journalist and colleague at the Harvard Kennedy Harvard School, said the media has been targeting the government for a long time, but the atmosphere during the protests was unprecedented.

“The Mark Lewin case cannot be considered an isolated incident,” he said.

Before the protests, journalists in Türkiye faced “systematic control over the Internet” and “arbitrary lawsuits”, according to the suit of the Laws without Borders, which ranked Türkiye 158 out of 180 countries In the World Press Freedom Index for 2024.

The group condemned the treatment of Mr. Lewin in a statement on Thursday, and He said earlier in the week These arrests of journalists during the protests represent an increase in government pressure on the press. “This is the first time that journalists who were in the middle of work clearly were sent to imprisonment under this law against public gatherings and protests,” said Aerol Underglo, a Turkish representative of Turkey, to journalists without borders.

Ben Hopard It contributed to the reports from Istanbul.