The Ankara Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office announced on 29 September that 36 of the 38 people detained in the latest wave of its investigation into the 2009 helicopter crash that killed the nationalist politician Muhsin Yazıcıoğlu had been remanded in custody. Two were placed under judicial control.

Among those remanded are the journalists Emre Soncan and Mehmet Yaşar Durukan.

Soncan was a defence, security and presidential correspondent for the daily Zaman, closed in 2016. He has written two books on the crash, Son Akıncı – Muhsin Yazıcıoğlu’nun Sır Ölümü and Keş Dağı’nda Bir Alperen. According to accounts published in pro-government media, he helped bring footage related to the case to the media. That is presented as part of the conduct under investigation. The accounts do not explain how publicising footage of the crash would have obstructed the establishment of what happened.

The same accounts accuse Durukan of contact with the Gülen movement and of attempting to steer the inquiry towards Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, prime minister at the time, and İlker Başbuğ, then chief of the general staff. They do not specify what he is alleged to have falsified. Durukan was already standing trial in a separate case concerning the Yazıcıoğlu investigation and denied the accusations at hearings in 2025.

Soncan was first jailed in July 2016. An İstanbul court sentenced him in April 2018 to seven years and six months for membership of a terrorist organisation, a charge he denied. He was released in 2021 after more than five years.

Police detained 33 people on 25 September and five afterwards, searching 45 addresses across 16 provinces with the National Intelligence Organisation and the Ankara police. Ten further people named in the detention orders were already in prison. Justice Minister Akın Gürlek announced the operation, saying investigators were examining claims that the search for the helicopter was misdirected, that false information notes were prepared and that witnesses and secret informants were manipulated.

The prosecutor’s office accuses the suspects of taking part in premeditated murder and of offences obstructing the establishment of the facts, and links the alleged acts to the Gülen movement. It has not identified individual roles, nor published evidence that the helicopter was brought down deliberately. The movement denies involvement in Yazıcıoğlu’s death.

Yazıcıoğlu, founder of the Grand Unity Party, was travelling between campaign events before the March 2009 local elections when his chartered helicopter crashed near Göksun, Kahramanmaraş, on 25 March 2009. It also killed three party officials, the pilot Kaya İstektepe and the İhlas News Agency reporter İsmail Güneş. Güneş reached emergency services after the crash and said he was seriously injured. Rescuers took around 47 hours to find the wreckage. His body was found separately five days later. GPS navigation equipment was removed from the wreckage. For seventeen years the families have asked for the deaths to be investigated as a possible assassination.

The file was transferred from Kahramanmaraş to Ankara on 12 June 2026. A first wave in July remanded 19 people and released eight under judicial control.

Fatih Ergin was remanded on 28 September under Article 217/A of the Criminal Code over a social media post. Three journalists have been remanded in four days, in two investigations that have nothing to do with each other.

A death that went unexplained for seventeen years is now being investigated in a way that places two reporters who wrote about it among those accused of causing it.