Turkey on Thursday deported a journalist for the largest Dutch financial newspaper, Het Financieele Dagblad, citing unspecified ‘security-related concerns’, the paper said.
Ans Boersma, 31, had been visiting an immigration office in Istanbul to extend her visa on Wednesday when she was detained, the paper said.
“And suddenly you’re sitting in the airplane back to the Netherlands,” Boersma said in a tweet on Thursday morning. “I’ve been “declared an ‘undesirable person’ in Turkey.”
Asked about the case, a Turkish official said: “At this time, all I can say is that her deportation wasn’t related to her journalistic activities or her reporting from Turkey.”
Her newspaper’s editor-in-chief, Jan Bonjer, called her deportation a “flagrant violation of press freedom”.
“Ans did her work prudently and responsibly… It’s extraordinarily sad that journalists in Turkey can’t do their work in peace,” he said in the paper.
Turkey, the world’s largest jailer of journalists, ranks 157th out of 180 countries in the 2018 World Press Freedom Index of Reporters Without Borders.
The Netherlands and Turkey recently restored diplomatic ties after a turbulent 2017 in which the Dutch government blocked Turkish politicians from campaigning among Dutch Turks ahead of Turkey’s April 2017 constitutional referendum.