DİHA reporter Pınar Ural was attacked on a bus in Istanbul while reporter Murat Altunöz was threatened by security guards while covering a university boycott.
(BIANET/IFEX) – Private security officials at the Mustafa Kemal University in Antakaya intervened when journalist Murat Altunöz was covering a boycott organized by the students’ association in the university canteen on 19 May 2010. Altunöz is the Dicle News Agency (DİHA) correspondent for the province of Hatay, on the eastern tip of the Mediterranean Sea.
Altunöz was forced to leave the campus. Plainclothes gendarmerie officers asked the reporter to hand over his camera. When he refused, he was forced into a vehicle with civil plates.
In the car, Altunöz was threatened, “We warned you before. Why are you making news for DİHA? You will have to face bad things.” The reporter was later let go.
Altunöz had received a death threat from a police officer last August in the Karlısu municipality of Antakya after covering the funeral of Yusuf Tiryakioğlu, a military officer who was killed in an armed conflict.
The officer reportedly told him: “We will take revenge. We will not bear you here and not the others either. You will see soon, all of you”.
In a separate incident, Pınar Ural, another DİHA reporter, was attacked on a public bus in Istanbul on 17 May. She was on her way back from a student protest at Istanbul Technical University, which she had covered for the news agency.
