A Turkish daily's damning publication of pictures of weapons carried by Syria-bound trucks run by Turkey's intelligence organization prompted the government to immediately secure a gag order from a judge in order to contain the fallout from the scandal.
The Cumhuriyet daily's headline story on Friday discredited the government's earlier claim that the trucks were carrying humanitarian aid to Turkmens in civil war-torn Syria.
The still video pictures published were obtained from files in the prosecutor's office related to the ongoing case about trucks run by the National Intelligence Organization (MİT), the daily said. The daily also uploaded a video footage on its website on Friday.
According to the report, there were six steel containers in the trucks which contained a total of 1,000 artillery shells, 50,000 machine gun rounds, 30,000 heavy machine gun rounds and 1,000 mortar shells. All this is registered in the prosecutor's file about the MİT-truck case, the report said.
Upon the publication of the story, the İstanbul Chief Prosecutor's Office quickly launched an investigation of Can Dündar, editor-in-chief of the Cumhuriyet daily who is also the author of the report, for breaching the anti-terrorism law.
İstanbul Public Prosecutor İrfan Fidan, who is overseeing the investigation of Dündar, also asked the court to issue a gag order on all publications that feature still pictures or video from the investigation file that display the search of the cargo in intercepted trucks.
He claimed that the leak harms the national security of Turkey and taints the international reputation of Turkish government.
Fidan, who the government is believed to have tasked with derailing critical probes incriminating President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, his family members and associates, previously ordered the detention of 34 military officers who intercepted the trucks. Half of these officers were later arrested by the court.
The government already obtained a blanket gag order in January from Adana 5th Criminal Court of Peace, preventing the media from reporting on documents that were leaked on Twitter by anonymous Twitter user @LazepeM, who claimed the information came from investigations done by the General Staff and the gendarmerie.
Twitter has already suspended access to the account @LazepeM in Turkey, but the ban has not been implemented on Twitter globally. Turkish authorities have already blocked access to four news portals that published the leaked documents.
A Twitter user known by the pseudonym Fuat Avni, who has revealed many government-backed operations in the past, maintained on Twitter that President Erdoğan instructed officials to conduct an investigation of the daily and its editor-in-chief on spying charges.
According to the Cumhuriyet report, when the steel covers of the weapons-laden boxes were removed by gendarmerie officers escorted by the prosecutors based on a search warrant, boxes with a “fragile” stamp on them were visible on top of the load.
It can be seen in the video that there were boxes of antibiotics and other medicine inside, “[But] When the boxes [of medicine] were removed, mortars lying below appear,” the report said. It also noted that “Tripoli” was written on wooden boxes containing some of the ammunition.
According to the report, an analysis of samples from the weapons shipment done in the gendarmerie's criminal laboratories revealed that the weapons, which are Russian-made, were obtained from countries that are former members of the Warsaw Pact.
Noting that the ammunition in the trucks was at risk of exploding in the event of a road accident, the report also said all of this indicated that the government tried -- in a secret operation about which some state agencies were not informed -- to transport to Syria materials that could blow up a whole city if involved in an accident during the journey.
In January last year, some trucks bound for Syria -- which the government said were being run by MİT -- were intercepted by gendarmes in two separate incidents in the southern provinces of Hatay and Adana, after prosecutors received tips that the trucks were illegally carrying arms to Syria.
The pictures published by the daily are of three MİT trucks stopped by the gendarmerie on a prosecutor's instructions in Adana on Jan. 19.
