Safiye Alağaş, former editor for the pro-Kurdish, all-female news website JINNEWS, is on release pending appeal after she was found guilty of membership in a terrorist organization in January 2025 and sentenced to six years and three months in prison.
Alağaş was taken into police custody – alongside 14 other Kurdish journalists and a media worker - in the southeastern Turkish city of Diyarbakır in June 2022.
She was released pending trial at the first hearing of her case in June 2023. In January 2025, she was found guilty of membership in the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which Turkey has designated as a terrorist group.
When she was taken into police custody in 2022, Alağaş was the managing news editor of JINNEWS, which focuses on women’s rights, Kurdish issues, and politics. JINNEWS and its staff have faced arrests, detentions, and legal cases in retaliation for their reporting several times in the past.
Alağaş was elected co-mayor of the southeastern province of Siirt on March 31, 2024, while her trial was underway.
Lawyers for Alağaş said their client would not have been found guilty if she lost the mayoral election.
One of the three judges in Alağaş’s case dissented from the guilty verdict, adding that the requirements defined by the law for the crime to have been committed were not fulfilled, according to CPJ’s review of the verdict.
Case history
In the early hours of June 8, 2022, Diyarbakır police raided several locations in the city, including journalists’ houses and newsrooms, and took into custody 20 journalists and media workers, along with a citizen, who was once interviewed by one of the journalists. On June 15, 15 of those journalists, including Alağaş, and one media worker were jailed by a court pending trial.
Alağaş said in an interview from the Women's Closed Prison in Diyarbakır, published by the leftist daily Evrensel in July 2022, that police came to her house around 5 a.m., searched the house for an hour, and confiscated phones and computers. The journalist said that police raided the Diyarbakır offices of JINNEWS at the same time, and that she still did not know what they took from the offices. Alağaş told Evrensel that the authorities questioned her about 50 stories published by JINNEWS.
Resul Temur, a lawyer who represents the 15 journalists and the media worker detained in 2022, told independent news website Bianet in 2022 that his clients were questioned about the angle they took on the PKK and whether the content the journalists created for broadcast by European outlets was considered pro-PKK.
Diyarbakır courts denied the journalists’ appeals of their arrests and their pretrial detention on August 22 and September 8, 2022.
CPJ emailed the Turkish Ministry of Justice in October 2022 and September 2026 for comment but did not receive any reply.