A Turkish court fined a leading newspaper Thursday for insulting President Recep Tayyip Erdogan while a top model went on trial on similar charges, as controversy grows over eroding freedoms ahead of June elections, AFP reports.
An Ankara court deemed that a column last year by one of the Hurriyet daily’s star commentators, Mehmet Yilmaz, was an “attack on the personal rights” of Erdogan.
It ordered the newspaper’s chairwoman and Yilmaz himself to pay 20,000 lira ($7,760) in damages to Erdogan, whose lawyers had requested 100,000 lira in the civil case, the official Anatolia news agency reported.
The report gave no details on the nature of the column dated August 25, 2014. But on that day, Hurriyet had published a lengthy article by Yilmaz recalling extensive corruption accusations against Erdogan, two weeks after his victory in presidential elections.