Alleged Islamic State connection of Erdoğan's son-in-law behind Wikipedia ban?

​It has been alleged that the Wikipedia entry on Berat Albayrak, Turkey's Minister of Energy and the son-in-law of President Erdoğan, may be the cause of Wikipedia ban in Turkey
Monday, 01 May 2017 06:30

Turkish government blocked access to Wikipedia on April 29, without any exact reason given by Information and Telecommunications Authority of Turkey (BTK).

Yet, the content of a previous e-mail to Wikipedia editor in chief by BTK raises a suspicion as to the cause of Wikipedia ban in Turkey. The e-mail in question is about the removal of Wikipedia entry on Berat Albayrak, Turkey's Minister of Energy and the son-in-law of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

The Wikipedia entry on Berat Albayrak contains allegations of Albayrak's connections to Islamic State (IS) oil trade. The entry in question is based on Wikileaks reports about the minister.

In December 2016, Wikileaks released more than 57,000 personal e-mails from the account of Albayrak, spanning sixteen years period from 2000 to 2016. The e-mails had been obtained by Redhack, a Turkish hacktivist group. Redhack placed the archive on Google Drive and Dropbox. The Turkish government then censored normal internet access to Google Drive, Dropbox, Microsoft Cloud and Github, and arrested a number of alleged Redhack suspects.

Albayrak's e-mails were said to reveal his connections to Powertrans, the company behind Islamic State oil smuggling. It had been alleged that Berat Albayrak was the "unofficial" owner of the oil company Powertrans, smuggling oil from Islamic State-controlled northern Iraq to Turkey.