ISTANBUL (Reuters) – The wife of prominent jailed Turkish opposition figure Selahattin Demirtas has been sentenced to 2 1/2 years in jail over a fraudulent medical report, the Cumhuriyet newspaper said.
Lawyers for Basak Demirtas, 44, said in a statement she was sentenced by a court due to a faulty date on a medical report issued by a doctor in southeastern province of Diyarbakir in 2015, Cumhuriyet reported on Friday.
Selahattin Demirtas, the former pro-Kurdish party leader and one of Turkey’s best-known politicians, has been in jail for nearly five years on terrorism-related charges that he denies.
Basak Demirtas’s lawyers could not immediately be reached for comment.
The European Parliament’s Turkey rapporteur, Nacho Sanchez Amor, said her sentencing seemed “political” for a clerical error.
Amor wrote https://twitter.com/NachoSAmor/status/1459093305212514304?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet on Twitter that “2.5 years of prison for a mere clerical error concerning a medical record is appalling and seems beyond common sense. It just looks so political. It gives the measure of the worrying state of Turkish judiciary.”
Basak Demirtas is free pending appeal of her conviction. Her lawyers said there was an error on the records that could be corrected by examining the appointment book of the local health care centre, the newspaper said.
(Reporting by Ezgi Erkoyun; Editing by William Mallard)
