Turkey detains UK professor over Nowruz celebration invitation
Turkey has detained a British academic for distributing invitations to a Kurdish ceremony to celebrate the Persian New Year, known as Nowruz, just hours after the country’s president called for redefining terrorism.
Chris Stephenson, a computer sciences lecturer at Istanbul’s Bilgi University, was arrested on Tuesday morning over accusations of advertising a “terror organization.”
The Istanbul prosecutor’s office claims the Cambridge graduate was arrested after going to a police station to show support for three Turkish scholars who had been detained the day before in relation to an investigation into a petition calling for a halt in offensives against the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).
Friends and witnesses have denied the prosecutor’s claims, saying that he was arrested after being found with a bilingual Nowruz (starting on March 20) celebration invitation signed by the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) provincial presidency.
"While being searched, they found the HDP-linked Nowruz invitation. Because of this, he was taken into custody,” a witness told The Telegraph.
Britain’s Foreign Office has confirmed the incident, stating that it was currently providing "assistance to a British national… and will remain in close contact with the local authorities".
It is not clear how long the British professor will remain in police custody in Istanbul.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has on various occasions claimed that the HDP is an extension of the PKK which Turkey deems as a terrorist group.
On Monday, Erdogan called for his country to “redefine” terror and terrorists, adding that the new definition would expand the country’s legal scope to encompass journalists, activists, legislators, and academics. "Either they are on our side, or on the side of the terrorists," he said.
Ankara has been engaged in a large-scale campaign against the PKK in its southern border region in the past few months. The Turkish military has also been conducting offensives against the positions of the group in northern Iraq.
The operations began in the wake of a deadly July 2015 bombing in the southern Turkish town of Suruc. More than 30 people died in the attack, which the Turkish government blamed on the Takfiri Daesh terrorist group.
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