Azime Bozkurt, a female employee of the pro-Kurdish ‘Yeni Yaşam’ newspaper, was taken into custody in Dersim on Thursday and taken to the provincial police headquarters. Reasons for the detention by the anti-terrorism police were not given.

The newspaper is a legal publication published by the Arinna publishing house in Istanbul. Since it is published in the tradition of the free Kurdish press and is a successor to Özgür Gündem newspaper, which was banned by a state emergency decree in 2016, it is permanently in the sights of the Turkish repressive authorities. The newspaper is one of the few in Turkey to report in detail on the consequences of the AKP government's war in the Kurdish settlement areas. The staff of the newspaper is also affected by arbitrary persecution.

Azime Bozkurt has been frequently detained in recent years for her work for pro-Kurdish newspapers. In 2016, Turkish police harassed the young woman, who was working for the Kurdish-language newspaper ‘Azadiya Welat’ at the time, in a dead end and threatened her with death. Last summer, Bozkurt was detained in the middle of the street in Dersim. The reason for her detention was pictures of the PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan on the front page of the newspaper issues that she carried with her.