From the Turkish president's point of view, the timing could not have been better. The house searches at the homes of two employees of the pro-government newspaper "Sabah" in Mörfelden-Walldorf, Hesse, fit perfectly into Recep Tayyip Erdogan's election campaign. The public prosecutor's office in Darmstadt and the police headquarters in southern Hesse justified the police action with the "suspicion of the endangering dissemination of personal data". The communications director of the Turkish presidential office, Fahrettin Altun, on the other hand, saw this not only as a "shameless operation" against "Turkish journalists" and a "serious violation of press freedom".

Friederike Böge

Political correspondent for Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan based in Ankara.

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Katharina Iskandar

Editor responsible for the "Rhein-Main" section of the Sonntagszeitung.

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On Twitter, he also constructed evidence of alleged complicity between Germany and the Turkish opposition in the presidential election. "It is completely clear that this operation ... with the assumption that certain politicians who promised in their meetings with foreign ambassadors to bring Turkey into line with the West could actually win on May 14."

Presumably in the direction of the German government, he added: "You will have to come to terms with the fact that Turkey will continue to be a great state that defends its citizens and, under the leadership of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, holds accountable those who dare to do something to them." However, only the run-off election on May 28 will decide who will govern Turkey in the future.

German Ambassador was summoned

Earlier, the Turkish Foreign Ministry summoned the German ambassador to Ankara, as confirmed from Berlin. At the same time, the state television TRT carried the wave of outrage to Washington. The correspondent there, Yunus Paksoy, asked State Department spokesman Vedant Patel to comment on the "terrible intimidation and treatment of journalists" in Germany.

When he pointed out that he did not know the background to the case, Paksoy accused him of double standards. The TV journalist also claimed that the two employees of the newspaper "Sabah" were "detained in front of their wives and children." According to the newspaper, however, their employees were prevented from informing their families.

According to the public prosecutor's office in Darmstadt and the police headquarters in southern Hesse, there were no arrests at all and certainly no detention, as claimed by some Turkish authorities. After the search of their homes, the two 46 and 51-year-old men were released, it said in a statement. Electronic storage media had been confiscated. According to Turkish sources, the men are Ismail Erel and Cemil Albay.

"Sabah" regularly publishes names and addresses

German security sources reported that the newspaper "Sabah" had deliberately published the names and addresses of exile journalists critical of the government last year. Journalists in Germany and Sweden, among others, were affected. They were presumably spied on by the Turkish secret service, according to the journalists themselves who live abroad. This is because their addresses were provided with an information block.

Some of them moved several times to be harder to find. In one case, the former editor-in-chief of the Gülen-affiliated newspaper "Today's Zaman", Abdullah Bozkurt, was then visited at his new home address in Sweden and seriously injured. In another report of the "Sabah" the exiled journalist Cevheri Güven was named. He was called a "terrorist", and his address in Hesse was also published and depicted on the front page of the newspaper. Güven is considered one of Erdogan's fiercest critics. Both cases later became public.

Ankara accuses Berlin of "double standards"

Communications Director Altun, on the other hand, accused the German authorities of giving shelter to members of a terrorist group. This refers to the movement of the preacher Fethullah Gülen, whom Ankara considers to be the mastermind of the 2016 coup attempt. Presidential adviser Ibrahim Kalin kept the alleged affair simmering on Thursday. He was asked by the news channel "A Haber" whether the police action in Hesse was connected to the election result in Turkey. He replied that if so, the action would "backfire."

The newspaper "Sabah" even went so far as to say that high-level talks were underway to obtain "the release" of Erel and Albay. The Foreign Ministry in Ankara called the alleged "arrests" an "act of harassment and intimidation of the Turkish press" and accused the German government, "which is trying to teach the world lessons in freedom of the press and freedom of expression," of double standards. One Turkish commentator even exaggerated the incident into a second "Spiegel affair". All of this fits in well with the campaign rhetoric of the president, who presents himself as a champion of his country's independence in the struggle with Western imperialists, i.e. his NATO partners.