A Turkish journalist faces up to five years and three months in prison over social media posts linking construction of a subway line to the collapse of an apartment building that killed four people near İstanbul, even though an expert report commissioned by prosecutors later supported a link between the construction and the disaster.
Ankara prosecutors charged Alican Uludağ, a judicial affairs reporter for Deutsche Welle’s Turkish service, with publicly spreading misleading information over posts he made on November 3, 2025, about the collapse in Gebze, a district in northwestern Turkey’s Kocaeli province. His first hearing is scheduled for November 5, the ANKA news agency reported on Monday.
The seven-story Arslan apartment building collapsed on October 29, 2025, killing Emine and Levent Bilir and their two children, ages 12 and 14. The couple’s 18-year-old daughter survived.
Uludağ wrote that construction of the Darıca-Gebze subway line beneath the building had contributed to the collapse and argued that the Ministry of Transport and Infrastructure bore responsibility. Prosecutors in Gebze secured an order blocking access to his post and opened an investigation that was later transferred to Ankara.
In an indictment dated September 10, Ankara prosecutors alleged that Uludağ had spread misleading information without supporting evidence in a manner capable of disturbing public peace. They cited the reach of his X account and accused him of repeating the offense in several posts. The indictment seeks a sentence ranging from one year and three months to five years and three months under Turkey’s law against spreading misleading information.
Uludağ told prosecutors that he had relied on information from official sources who inspected the site after the collapse and that reporting on four deaths served the public interest, according to ANKA.
The first expert panel appointed in the investigation subsequently found that subway excavation had contributed to a loss of ground beneath the building. Its report, submitted in December, assigned primary responsibility to the subway contractor’s project management and faulted ministry and municipal personnel over failures to monitor the risks and evacuate the building, according to reporting by Uludağ for Deutsche Welle. That report was produced after his November posts.
The cause remains disputed. A second expert report pointed to weak ground and defects in the building, while a third concluded there was insufficient evidence connecting the subway work to the collapse. The third report also faulted municipal officials for failing to evacuate the building after signs of danger emerged.
Uludağ was jailed pending trial in February in a separate case involving his social media posts, including an accusation that he insulted President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. He obtained the first Gebze expert report while in prison and was released in May.
Turkey introduced the misleading information offense in 2022. Data compiled by a journalism research platform showed that prosecutors had brought charges under the law against at least 83 journalists by April 2026, prompting criticism from press freedom groups over its use against reporting.
