Mehmet Baransu

rdf:langString Mehmet Baransu

rdf:langString Mehmet Baransu

rdf:langString Mehmet Baransu

rdf:langString Turkish

rdf:langString Author

rdf:langString

rdf:langString Journalist

rdf:langString Mehmet Baransu (born 1977) is a Kurdish journalist and author from Turkey. He is a correspondent for Taraf, and previously worked for Aksiyon (1997–2000). He is the winner of a 2009 Sedat Simavi Journalism Award. Known for investigating the Turkish military, he reported on the "Cage Action Plan" which became part of the Ergenekon trials, and published documents in January 2010 revealing "Balyoz" ("Sledgehammer"), a plan for a coup that was supposedly hatched by Turkish military officers in 2003. In January 2010, in connection with Sledgehammer, Baransu delivered a suitcase to the Istanbul Chief Public Prosecutor's Office a suitcase containing evidence of the coup plot such as CDs, tapes, printed documents, and handwritten notes. The Sledgehammer plot involved plans to bomb two mosques in Istanbul, attack a military museum and blame it on religious extremists, and attack a Turkish plane and blame it on Greece. Three hundred and thirty-one of the 365 suspects were sentenced to prison on 21 September 2012, while the remaining 34 were acquitted. Three retired generals were sentenced to life in prison on charges of "attempting to overthrow the government by force," but their terms were later reduced to 20 years. Turkey's Constitutional Court ruled in June 2014 that the rights of most of the convicted suspects had been violated, and ordered the immediate release of 236 of them. The rest were released later. A new trial began on 3 November 2014. Reports released in December 2014 and February 2015 claimed that some of the evidence in the case was fabricated. In 2010 it was revealed that the phones of both Baransu and his wife, Esra Baransu, had been tapped by the Turkish Gendarmerie on false pretences. The Gendarmerie had obtained warrants for the phone taps by falsely representing the IMEI code numbers of the Baransus' phones as belonging to fictional Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) suspects. In 2011 five military officers were each sentenced to five years in jail for these actions. In 2011 a voice recording posted online, allegedly by a military official, said that Baransu should be killed as a warning to others. His books include Mösyö: Hanefi Avcı’nın Yazamadıkları (2010), which alleges that former police chief Hanefi Avcı had committed torture and developed connections with the Devrimci Karargâh group, and that Avcı had published his book on Ergenekon to try to ward off arrest. His 2012 book Pirus alleged plans to assassinate Chief of the General Staff Hilmi Özkök to permit a 2004 coup, and suggested that the plans were foiled when US officials found out about them.

rdf:langString Taraf