Chief prosecution hampering release

Our newspaper’s lawyers today applied to Istanbul Serious Crime Court No 27 for the release of our accounting employee Emre İper, one of 11,480 people identified by Ankara Republic Chief Prosecution to have been routed involuntarily to ByLock IPs due to using programmes into which the “Purple Brain” program has been inserted. İper was not released because Istanbul Republic Chief Prosecution had not supplied the court with the list forwarded by Ankara Republic Chief Prosecution. From what has been gleaned, the list appears to have been sent from Ankara, but Istanbul Republic Chief Prosecution will break the list down by applicable court and then send it. On the other hand, Felicity Party Istanbul Provincial Administrative Board Member Mustafa Yaman, Attorney-at-Law, who was in detention charged with being a ByLock user, has been released with his name appearing on the updated ByLock list.

 Our accounting employee Emre İper was arrested on 6 April at the behest of Yasemin Baba, one of the prosecutors who drafted the Cumhuriyet trial indictment. Prosecutor Baba sought a detention order on the charge of being a ByLock user against İper, whom she had not summoned to give a statement until his arrest as part of an investigation launched in 2016 by Ankara Republic Chief Prosecution. Istanbul Penal Judgeship of the Peace No 12 judge, Ömer Harun Özbek, then detained İper on the basis of a three-line briefing by the Anti-Smuggling and Organised Crime Department Headship. With İper having noticed prior to his detention that his name and phone number were included as a “ByLock user” in the Cumhuriyet indictment, he had a backup made of his phone. Even though the backup is in the investigation file, prosecutor Baba commissioned absolutely no report into İper’s phone.

 In reaction to this, an expert option from judicial IT expert Koray Peksayar was procured by our paper’s lawyers into the backup of İper’s phone. It was stated in the opinion that no trace had been detected of ByLock having been installed or installed and deleted on İper’s phone. This opinion was also submitted to prosecutor Baba at the investigation stage. However, despite this report, prosecutor Baba alleged in the indictment she drafted that İper was a FETO member. Following joinder of the trial filed against İper with the Cumhuriyet trial, the judicial IT engineer Tuncay Beşikçi, who had made an examination of the backup of İper’s phone, was heard at the hearing as a witness. Beşikçi, stating that İper had not set up the ByLock program, said, “He was routed through a music program called Freezy. The people who made this routing have FETO ties.” Beşikçi noted that to identify real ByLock users, it was necessary to check whether there was a “Purple Brain” record before ByLock. Despite Beşikçi’s testimony, the bench of Istanbul Serious Crime Court No 27 presided over by Abdurrahman Orkun Dağ did not release İper. The bench requested another expert’s report into İper’s phone at the second hearing on 11 September, but, as the report had not entered the file despite the passage of three months, the extension of İper’s detention was also ordered at the fifth hearing heard a few days ago.

 http://www.cumhuriyet.com.tr/haber/turkiye/894615/Ozgurluge_bassavcilik_engeli.html