Turkish police on Tuesday detained Deutsche Welle Turkish service reporter Alican Uludağ, two months after he was released following 90 days in pretrial detention on charges related to his social media posts, DW Turkish reported.
“I am being detained,” Uludağ wrote in a brief post on X.
The reason for his detention was not immediately clear, and his lawyers had yet to make contact with him, according to DW Turkish. No official statement had been issued as of Tuesday afternoon.
It was also unclear whether the detention was connected to his ongoing trial on charges of publicly insulting President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, publicly disseminating misleading information and publicly denigrating the Turkish government and the state’s judicial bodies.
Uludağ was detained at his home in Ankara on February 19 over several posts on X and subsequently jailed pending trial. He was released under judicial supervision at his first hearing on May 21 after spending 90 days in İstanbul’s Marmara Prison in Silivri.
During that hearing before the Ankara 57th Criminal Court of First Instance, Uludağ denied the allegations and said he was being prosecuted for his journalistic work.
“I was detained, but I did not commit a crime that warrants arrest. … I am a journalist who is being silenced,” he told the court.
“I made general criticisms. I criticized the relationship between the judiciary and politics. As a judicial reporter, I criticized operations in the judiciary on social media. I’d like to know what’s criminal about that?” he said.
The court adjourned the trial until September 18.
Uludağ, an award-winning journalist who has worked as a judicial reporter for 18 years, is known for covering corruption cases, politically sensitive trials and human rights violations.
His imprisonment sparked criticism from press freedom and rights groups as well as the German government, which described the allegations against him as “baseless.”
Journalists in Turkey frequently face detention and prosecution under broadly worded laws criminalizing insults against public officials, the dissemination of allegedly misleading information and denigration of state institutions.
According to Expression Interrupted, a press freedom monitoring group, 26 journalists are currently behind bars in Turkey.
Turkey fell to 163rd out of 180 countries in the 2026 World Press Freedom Index published by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) earlier this month, down from 159th in 2025, as the group warned that authoritarianism is deepening and media pluralism is increasingly under threat in the country.
