Ahmet Şık: I would be ashamed to call them colleagues

Following hearing prosecutor Hacı Hasan Bölükbaşı’s opinion seeking the continuation of detention, our reporter Ahmet Şık said the following:
“There appear people in all professions who use the authority and responsibilities vested in them for the benefit of their own interests and powerful groups, and they similarly appear in the media. As a journalist who attaches importance to professional ethics, I have never engaged in such immorality, nor will I do so. I have not called and will not call such people “my colleagues” however much they are in the same profession as me, because this would be to insult the profession. (Reads the record submitted to the court bearing Deputy Chief Prosecutor Hasan Yılmaz’s signature concerning Tweets on the Karlov assassination.) Were I a judge or a prosecutor, I would be ashamed to call Hasan Yılmaz, who comments in these terms on this record that he alleges to be evidence and that attests to his zeal to prove my guilt, “my colleague”.
I made the acquaintance of a similar such person at the detention stage. His name is Fahrettin Kemal Yerli. My lawyer Can Atalay gave a detailed account at the previous session of the unlawful acts he engaged in. A prosecutor trampled on the law and became carried away with zeal to create evidence and committed a crime. The thing over which charges were raised was an interview conducted on the telephone with two people embroiled in an event involving the murder of your colleague. This interview, even though responsibility is attributed to me here, has also been adduced as evidence against all the defendants for the ludicrous charge of engaging in activity on behalf of the DHKP-C. So, if you are to level charges over this, I am the one who is responsible. There can be no such charge against the others.
I made headline news in the Yeni Şafak newspaper prior to the 24 July hearing. It said, ‘Ahmet Şık took instructions from Mihraç Ural.’ Is such idiocy conceivable? Because the state came and told me, “This man’s going to kill you. We want to give you protection.” Do these hatchet men who commission these news reports not possess a grain of intelligence? What business does an HTS record that has not entered the file have in Yeni Şafak? Either one of your bench, or somebody working in the office, or one of the investigating prosecutors is systematically leaking documents to these hatchet men. A trial cannot be conducted like this. Are we to hold the trial here, or are we to hold it in this rag, in this shambles of a newspaper that has assumed the role of hatchet man for a mafia gang?
There is a police letter dated 8 September. There is mention of the possibility that “it may be considered to be evidence of guilt” in an examination made of the Twitter account held by Ahmet Şık. I said in my Tweet, ‘No record has been encountered of Mert Altıntaş in the investigation into the brotherhood.’ The prosecutor must have solved the Karlov assassination in that he says FETO/PDY did it. There is no such determination. The file is still open. I am trying to inquire into the employing of a jihadist policeman as a state functionary, which is the correct question. This is what is giving the prosecution grief, because the AKP wants us not to discuss the truth as to why Turkey went through 15 July.
Prosecutor Yerli sent me off to be detained on charges relating to FETO, the PKK/ KCK and DHKP-C. Following the passage of four or five months, people thought with justification that they were having their legs pulled, what with them calling Ahmet Şık a Gulenist and FETOist. This charge was dropped in the indictment. Come, let’s call things by the correct name. A group of people are in detention out of the designs of a dynastic mafia gang that is striving to reduce the entire country to rubble for the sake of this political rulership’s own fortunes.”