Convicted editor says wife banned from leaving Turkey
The wife of the former editor-in-chief of Turkey's top opposition daily Cumhuriyet was banned on Saturday from flying to Germany and her passport seized, her husband said on Twitter.
Less than three weeks after Can Dundar stepped down from the paper, Dilek Dundar was told she could not fly to Berlin at Istanbul's Ataturk airport, the state-run news agency Anadolu said.
Her passport had been cancelled last month, Cumhuriyet added.
The agency said Dundar's passport was seized and she left after being told she could not leave the country.
Dundar was defiant on Twitter, saying he and his wife would not be intimidated.
"They took my wife hostage. Law of the jungle. But in vain. Neither I nor a woman who jumped on top of a gun can be frightened of this," he said, referring to an incident in May when his wife grappled with a gunman who tried to shoot her husband outside an Istanbul court.
Dundar was sentenced by the court in May to five years and 10 months in prison for allegedly revealing state secrets in a story that infuriated Turkey's authoritarian president Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Cumhuriyet's report on a shipment of arms intercepted at the Syrian border in January 2014 sparked a furore when it was published in May 2015, with Erdogan warning Dundar himself he would "pay a heavy price".
Dundar is believed to be in Germany after he was freed earlier this year pending an appeal following his trial.
Last month, he said he would not surrender himself to the Turkish courts because he had lost faith in the judiciary after the failed July 15 coup and the three-month state of emergency imposed in the days after.
"To trust such a judiciary would be like putting one's head under the guillotine," he wrote in a Cumhuriyet column entitled "time to say farewell".
"Therefore, I've decided not to surrender to this judiciary at least until the state of emergency is lifted."