Alghadeer TV Alghadeer TV
Turkey summoned Egypt’s charge d’affaires on Wednesday over a raid on the office of the Turkish state news agency Anadolu in Cairo, where four staff members were arrested.
The news agency said police stormed its office on Tuesday evening and searched for it until the early morning hours.
According to Anadolu, the arrested people include one Turkish national and three Egyptians. They have been taken to an undisclosed location.
“This act of violence against Anadolu not only shows the Egyptian leadership’s hostile stance towards the freedom of the press but also once again shows its grave conditions on democracy and transparency,” Turkey’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
It called on Egyptian authorities to immediately release the detained employees.
Turkey’s Communications Director Fahrettin Altun censured the raid as a “hostile attempt against Anadolu employees by Egypt’s putschist leadership”, urging the international community to denounce the move.
Relations between Ankara and Cairo have soured since Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s first democratically-elected president and a close ally of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ruling party, was ousted in a military coup in 2013. Morsi died in June 2019.
The two countries are on opposing sides of the conflict in Libya, where Egypt, along with the United Arab Emirates, backs rebel commander General Khalifa Haftar, whose forces have been engaged in an offensive since April to take the capital Tripoli from the internationally-recognized Government of National Accord (GNA), which is supported by Ankara.
