Claim: Cumhuriyet says its journalists sentenced for blasphemy

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Claim: Cumhuriyet says its journalists sentenced for blasphemy

2016-04-29 01:22 BST
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Reuters claims Cumhuriyet said its journalists sentenced for blasphemy

Hikmet Cetinkaya (left) and Ceyda Karan (right)

On 28 April 2016, Reuters correspondent Ece Toksabay wrote a news article about the jail sentence passed to two journalists of Cumhuriyet daily.

Toksabay claimed that “A Turkish court sentenced two journalists to two years in jail for blasphemy on Thursday, their newspaper said, after they reprinted a controversial cover from the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo above their columns last year.”

As a matter of fact, Cumhuriyet, however, did not say that journalists Ceyda Karan and Hikmet Cetinkaya were sentenced for “blasphemy.”

On the contrary, Cumhuriyet made it clear that the grounds for sentence were “openly encouraging hate and enmity among people via the press” and also that “The court ruled for the acquittal of the journalists on charges of ‘insulting people’s religious values’ on the grounds that the criminal factors had not been constituted.”