Mehmet Yılmaz has been remanded in custody in İstanbul. State broadcaster TRT Haber reported the decision. The authorities had been looking for him for ten years.

He was an editor at the Bugün daily, held several positions at Zaman, and was editor-in-chief of Özgür Düşünce. None of those newspapers exists. All three were closed by emergency decree, among more than 160 media outlets shut down after July 2016.

The accusation against him is that he used ByLock, an encrypted messaging application that was for a time freely available on the Apple and Google stores and which the Turkish authorities say was a covert communication tool.

He was detained in raids across four districts of İstanbul alongside two other men, who were also remanded. One, Abdullah Ilık, had previously been sentenced to more than six years for membership of an armed terrorist organisation and had been sought for three years. The other, Serdar Uluocak, is a dismissed police officer; the report does not state what he is accused of.

Zaman, where Yılmaz worked, was confiscated from its owners before it was closed. On 4 March 2016 the İstanbul 6th Criminal Judgeship of Peace appointed a trustee over the paper and the Feza Media Group at the request of the İstanbul Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office. Police raided the building and used pepper gas against the people who gathered outside. Human Rights Watch called it a new blow to freedom of expression and said the government should reverse it immediately.

On 14 October this year the state Savings Deposit Insurance Fund was appointed trustee over Halk TV, at the request of the İstanbul Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office, after police raided its headquarters and stopped its broadcasts. The same researcher at Human Rights Watch commented on both.

Ten years separate the two seizures. Five days separate the second from Mehmet Yılmaz’s remand.

The evidence against him has a judgment attached to it. In Yüksel Yalçınkaya v. Türkiye, decided by the ECtHR Grand Chamber on 26 September 2023, the European Court of Human Rights held that Turkish courts had treated the use of ByLock as conclusive proof of every element of membership of an armed organisation, in violation of Article 7, and that the failure to disclose the underlying data and to engage with objections to its reliability violated Article 6 § 1. The Court found the problem systemic and called for general measures.

Since then the Court has decided the same question again and again. In December 2025 it gave judgment in three cases covering 2,420 applicants, holding that establishing ByLock use had served “on its own, as conclusive proof of the presence of all the constituent elements of the crime” and that this stemmed from “a systemic problem affecting a large number of persons”. In June 2026 three further judgments covered 893 applicants, and in September 2026 three more covered 947. In May 2026, in Yasak v. Türkiye, the Grand Chamber held that courts cannot substitute a list of evidence for proof of criminal intent. Including Yalçınkaya and Yasak, some 4,501 applicants have had violations found in this line of cases.

The scale of what continues is set out in the government’s own figures. In July the Justice Minister told the Sabah daily that since the 2016 coup attempt legal proceedings had been brought against 720,338 people in connection with the Gülen movement. Of those, 127,102 have been convicted — 17.6 per cent. Proceedings remain open against 83,404. There are 10,485 people in prison. Arrest warrants have been issued against 33,827. In the first six months of this year there were 1,065 operations and 2,451 people were detained.

Mehmet Yılmaz is one of them. He edited newspapers that no longer exist, and he has been remanded over an application the European Court has ruled, five times in three years, cannot carry the weight placed on it.