A court has issued an arrest warrant for Today’s Zaman and Taraf columnist Emre Uslu as part of an ongoing trial against the columnist over claims that he slandered Humanitarian Aid Foundation (İHH) Chairman Bülent Yıldırım in a column he wrote for Taraf, a news report says.

The Vatan daily reported on its website that the 2nd Anadolu Criminal Court of First Instance issued the warrant upon the request of Yıldırım’s lawyer on the grounds that “the journalist could not be found despite all attempts to search for him.”

Uslu’s lawyer said his client is currently working at a university in the US and demanded Uslu’s testimony be taken via the Foreign Ministry.

The indictment seeks up to seven years in prison for Uslu on charges of “slander through the media” over his column dated Jan. 15, 2014, titled “Al-Qaeda, İHH, trucks, etc…” In it, he questioned the alleged ties between al-Qaeda and the İHH, which is the organization that organized the Mavi Marmara flotilla campaign to Gaza which was stormed by Israeli forces in international waters, resulting in the killing of eight Turkish citizens and one Turkish-American.

Emre Uslu is one the best Turkish Journalist that exposing Turkish Government crime