Turkish Medical Association Chair arrested, incarcerated

Sebnem Korur Fincanci, the Chair of the Turkish Medical Association (TTB) was arrested on Thursday, a day after she was detained in a raid on her house in Istanbul. Following the order of arrest, Fincanci was taken to Sincan prison in capital Ankara.

A police squad raised their shields to block out Fincanci as she waved her hand at a group of lawyers in front of the court house, +Gercek said.

Fincanci rejected the charges against her in her statement to the prosecution, according to a report by +Gercek's Seda Taskin, and told about the circumstances in which she had made her remarks about a video allegedly showing a victim of chemical warfare.

She said in her statement:

"A colleague I met for the time during a conference on 'Prison and Human Rights,' organized by Rosa Luxemburg Foundation in Germany on 18 October, showed me and a group of colleagues a video. We exchanged views about the video. This was the incident that I first became aware of that video before I was connected to Medya TV's live broadcast. My comments in question, concerning chemical, toxic and poisonous gases in the context of the images that I examined, are of preliminary nature."

The raid on Fincanci's house and her eventual incarceration followed Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's statements on Monday that "necessary steps, concerning both this person and the association in question, will be taken."

The video in question had raised concerns over allegations about the use of chemical weapons by the Turkish army in its ongoing military campaign in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq.