Diplomatic Briefing

Your exclusive news aggregator handpicked daily!

Newsline: Turkish embassy accused of spying in Greece

A police liaison officer assigned to the Turkish embassy in Athens ran a covert operation to collect intelligence in Athens and Thessaloniki, a secret Turkish government document obtained by Nordic Monitor has revealed. (https://en.protothema.gr/turkish-embassy-police-spied-in-greek-cities-of-athens-and-thessaloniki-secret-document-reveals/) The document, sent by the Security General Directorate (Emniyet) on September 2, 2020 to nearly a dozen provincial police departments, said the Turkish Foreign Ministry had passed on intelligence gathered by a police officer who works at the Turkish embassy. The communiqué, classified as secret, mentioned six business establishments in Athens and Thessaloniki and 13 residents who are allegedly linked to the Gülen movement, a group critical of the government of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The document noted that the intelligence was part of a broader clandestine operation launched by the Turkish government in Greece to identify targets from the Gülen group, confirming that multiple agencies were involved in spying in a foreign territory. The spying activity shows that the Erdoğan government not only disregards the law in a NATO ally — a neighboring country — by engaging aggressive spying activities but also does not feel bound by Turkish laws that prohibit Turkish police from carrying out such work.

No comments yet»

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: