Almost 50,000 people took to Twitter over the weekend to call on Turkish authorities to release Gültekin Avcı, a former Turkish prosecutor and TV pundit who was sentenced to aggravated life and to an additional 44 years in prison in December 2020.
According to the Jailed Journos twitter account, a total of 49,655 tweets have been posted with hashtags “#FreeGultekinAvci since July 11, 2021.
Avcı was charged in connection with a series of columns he wrote in 2013 and 2014 for Bugün in which he alleged that the Turkish National Intelligence Organization (MİT), the country’s spy agency, had links to a group called Tawhid-Salam.
Tawhid-Salam is an Iran-backed terrorist organization that was investigated for three years by Turkish police and allegedly involved high-ranking politicians.
