A Turkish prosecutor has demanded life imprisonment for an opposition MP accused of providing a newspaper with video purporting to show Turkey's intelligence agency trucking weapons into Syria.
Lawmaker Enis Berberoğlu of the main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) in the parliament is due to appear in court on charges of aiding an armed terrorist organization and making public information that was supposed to stay secret.
A report in Cumhuriyet newspaper in May 2015 said that trucks allegedly owned by the National Intelligence Agency (MIT), Turkey's state intelligence service, were found to contain weapons and ammunition that were headed for Syria when they were stopped and searched in southern Turkey in early 2014.
The government has denied weapons were sent to Syria, saying the trucks were carrying humanitarian aid.
Last year, the former editor-in-chief of the Cumhuriyet newspaper, Can Dündar, and the Ankara representative, Erdem Gül were sentenced to at least five years in jail for revealing state secrets in a related case. The prosecutor is now seeking an additional 10 years in prison for Dündar and Gül over the report on intelligence trucks.
In a book he wrote after he was released, Dündar said “a leftist lawmaker” brought him the footage on May 27, 2014. The prosecutor’s office then examined Dündar’s phone records and determined that he talked to Berberoğlu on the date that he wrote in his book.
