page_title: Can Dündar
section_title: Conflict with the government and 2015 arrest
hierarchical_section_title: Can Dündar / Publishing career / Conflict with the government and 2015 arrest
caption_attribution_description: Türkçe: Can Dündar &amp; Erdem Gül support
context_page_description: Can Dündar is a Turkish journalist, columnist and documentarian. Editor-in-chief of center-left Cumhuriyet newspaper until August 2016, he was arrested in November 2015 after his newspaper published footage showing the State Intelligence MİT sending weapons to Syrian Islamist fighters.
  One of the "best known" figures in Turkish media, Dündar has written for several newspapers, produced many television programs for state-owned TRT and various private channels including CNN Türk and NTV, and published more than 20 books. Dündar is the recipient of the International Press Freedom Award by the Committee to Protect Journalists. In 2016, Can Dündar, together with Erdem Gül, were awarded the Prize for the Freedom and Future of the Media, by the Leipzig Media Foundation, lead partner of the European Centre for Press and Media Freedom. Since June 2016, he has lived in exile in Germany, with an arrest warrant against him in Turkey. Currently he is editor-in-chief of #ÖZGÜRÜZ, a web radio station run by the nonprofit newsroom CORRECTIV. He is also one of the 25 leading figures on the Information and Democracy Commission launched by Reporters Without Borders.
context_section_description: A longstanding columnist for Milliyet, Dündar was laid off in August 2013 for "writing too sharply" about the Gezi protests and the developments in Egypt, as the paper's owner Erdoğan Demirören put it. Dündar recalled: "It was said to me, ‘We do not wish to see stories that will displease the prime minister in this paper. Everything displeases them, and after they are displeased, they go after us’."
  Subsequently, he turned to the center-left Cumhuriyet, and on 8 February 2015 became the newspaper's new editor-in-chief. In November, Cumhuriyet was awarded the 2015 Reporters Without Borders Prize for its "independent and courageous journalism."
  Shortly thereafter, Dündar and Cumhuriyet's Ankara bureau chief Erdem Gül were arrested on charges of being members of a terror organization, espionage and revealing confidential documents, facing sentences of up to life imprisonment. The investigations had been launched in May, after the newspaper published photos depicting weapons transferred to Syria in trucks of the National Intelligence Organization, subject of the MİT trucks scandal. In June 2015, Turkish President Erdoğan had publicly targeted Dündar, stating: "The individual who reported this as an exclusive story will pay a heavy price for this." In prison, Dündar was denied colored pencils to draw with but made his own paint by pressing fruit in his cell, refusing the ban on color and smuggling his paintings out of prison because he "wanted to prove that color can exist even in the darkest of places."
  After 92 days in prison, Dündar and Gül were released on 26 February 2016 after the Supreme Court decided that their detention was an "undue deprivation of liberty".
caption: Protest in support of Can Dündar and Erdem Gül, 26 December 2015
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