SpaceWar.com - Your World At War
Greece demands 'clear answers' from Turkey on detained soldiers: official
Athens, March 30 (AFP) Mar 30, 2018
Greece on Friday demanded "clear answers" from Turkey on the exact charges faced by two soldiers held in a Turkish prison after they illegally crossed the border earlier this month.

"We demand clear answers as to why, a month after the two soldiers were arrested, we do not know what they are charged with," government spokesman Dimitris Tzanakopoulos told reporters.

"This is a stance of obstruction that gives the impression that Turkey is trying to exploit the issue in order to exert political and diplomatic pressure. We do not consider this legitimate," Tzanakopoulos said.

Turkish media have reported that the pair, arrested on March 2 for entering a military zone in the northern Turkish province of Edirne, have been charged with espionage.

But Athens contends that Turkish authorities have not given adequate detail of the charges and on what evidence they are based.

On Tuesday, the Edirne court rejected a fresh appeal by the soldiers' Turkish lawyers for their conditional release, the private Dogan news agency reported, without providing any details.

The judgement was announced after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan came under pressure from EU chiefs at a meeting in Bulgaria on Monday to release the pair.

European Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker said the bloc's 28 member states had confidence in the Turkish side "to solve that (the issue of the soldiers) in the best way".

An EU meeting in Brussels last week condemned Turkey over the soldiers' arrest in a show of firm support for Athens.

The soldiers told prosecutors shortly after their arrest that they mistakenly crossed the border after getting lost in the fog.

But according to Turkey's state-run Anadolu news agency, they have been charged with "attempted military espionage" by prosecutors as well as entering a forbidden military zone.

It said the pair testified they entered the Turkish side by tracking footsteps in the snow and filmed images on their mobile phones to send to higher ranking officials.

The arrest of the soldiers have strained ties between Ankara and Athens, who are already at loggerheads over the exploration of gas reserves in the eastern Mediterranean.

The long-standing foes have also clashed over Turkish demands that Greece extradite eight Turkish troops wanted over the July 2016 attempted coup aimed at unseating Erdogan.

burs-jph/bp


ADVERTISEMENT




Space News from SpaceDaily.com
China Focus: Chinese scientist details first planned Mars sample-return mission Tianwen 3
NASA says it will lose about 20 percent of its workforce
Building blocks of life found in distant star system suggest origins in interstellar space

24/7 Energy News Coverage
Trump administration expected to say greenhouse gases aren't harmful
MicroCarb satellite launches to map global carbon dioxide emissions from space
Rollable solar array by GalaxySpace redefines satellite compactness and power efficiency

Military Space News, Nuclear Weapons, Missile Defense
Airbus CO3D satellites begin mission to generate high precision global 3D map
BlackSky to supply satellite imagery and analytics for Latin American security operations
GovSat selects Thales Alenia Space to build secure satellite for military communications

24/7 News Coverage
First wildfire images reveal FireSat's unmatched detection capabilities
MetOp Second Generation satellite fully fuelled ahead of August launch
MicroCarb satellite launch marks new era in urban carbon tracking



All rights reserved. Copyright Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse.