ADANA, Turkey
Two foreign journalists who were released after being held on terrorism charges in southeastern Turkey have been deported, according to Turkish officials.
The British journalists, Jake Hanrahan and Philip Pendlebury, who reportedly worked for the U.S.-based news outlet, Vice News, were sent from southern Adana province on a scheduled flight to Germany, local administration officials said.
Their Iraqi translator, Mohammed Ismael Rasool, who police said was an international relations student at the Istanbul Fatih University, would remain under arrest after an alleged encryption system used by Daesh was found on his computer, the sources said.
The trio had been arrested in front of their hotel in Turkey’s southeast Diyarbakir province on Aug. 28 and charged with "knowingly and willfully helping the armed terrorist organization without being a part of its hierarchical structure", sources said, without naming the organization which they allegedly aided.
Hanrahan and Pendlebury were then released on September 3 by the Third Criminal Court in Diyarbakir.
A police search conducted in the hotel room of the trio revealed video cameras and hard disks involving alleged footage and interviews of armed members of the Patriotic Revolutionary Youth Movement (YDG-H) -- the youth wing of the terrorist PKK organization -- as well as various other alleged footage of dug up streets, and YDG-H members making bombs and Molotov cocktails, according to police records obtained by Anadolu Agency on September 1.
Vice News on its website had denied all charges against the trio as “baseless and absurd”.
