On 19 December 2024, Kurdish journalists Nazım Daştan and Cihan Bilgin were murdered in a targeted drone attack by the Turkish state south of Kobanê. Both had been working for the Kurdish media for many years and were most recently reporting from the Euphrates front about the attacks by the Turkish army and the jihadist alliance SNA on the self-governing Rojava.

Two days later, on 21 December, press associations based in Turkey wanted to make a public statement in Istanbul against the murder of their colleagues. However, the police forcibly prevented the gathering and detained almost 60 people. One day later, a court of emergency ordered the imprisonment of seven journalists and two local politicians from the DEM Party.

Journalists Gülistan Dursun, Hayri Tunç, Yeni Yaşam newspaper reporter Enes Sezgin, Osman Akın, Can Papila, Etkin News Agency (ETHA) reporter Pınar Gayıp, and Mücadele Birliği journalist Serpil Ünal, and two politicians, Hacı Ugiş and İmam Şenol, were remanded in custody on charges of “making propaganda for an illegal organization” and “opposing Law No. 2911 on Meetings and Demonstrations”.

The third hearing of the case against nine people was held at the Istanbul Çağlayan Courthouse on Thursday.

Two police officers who testified at the trial claimed that the Beyoğlu District Governor's Office had banned the demonstration and that they had therefore intervened against the group gathered in front of the Şişli Municipality. The police officers claimed that they had made a warning announcement before the intervention.

In his opinion on the case, the prosecutor requested that each of the nine defendants be separately sentenced for “making propaganda for an illegal organization” and “organizing an unauthorized demonstration.”

While the journalists' lawyers requested time to respond to the opinion, the court postponed the hearing to a later date.