Writer Doğan Akhanlı is being held in Spain on a Turkish warrant, but the charges remain unclear

This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

Germany’s foreign minister has urged Spain not to extradite a German writer to Turkey after he was arrested on a Turkish warrant.

Sigmar Gabriel called his Spanish counterpart over the arrest of Doğan Akhanlı while in Granada on holiday.

Akhanlı was born in Turkey but emigrated to Germany in 1991 after spending years in Turkish prison following the 1984 military coup in the country.

He was arrested after Turkey issued an Interpol warrant for the writer, a critic of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government, increasing tensions between the Nato allies.

The arrest of the writer was part of a “targeted hunt against critics of the Turkish government living abroad in Europe,” Akhanlı’s lawyer Ilias Uyar told magazine Der Spiegel, which first reported Akhanlı’s detention.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tensions remain high between Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Angela Merkel. Photograph: Michael Kappeler/AFP/Getty Images

Any country can issue an Interpol “red notice”, but extradition by Spain would only follow if Ankara could convince Spanish courts it had a real case against him.

Ties between Ankara and Berlin have been increasingly strained in the aftermath of last year’s failed coup in Turkey as Turkish authorities sacked or suspended 150,000 people and detained more than 50,000, including other German nationals.

Berlin to change policy towards Turkey as German citizen is held Read more

“This is a development of dramatic significance,” said Social Democrat leader Martin Schulz at a campaign rally. “As part of his (Erdoğan’s) paranoid counter-putsch, he is reaching out for our citizens on the territory of European Union states.”

Schulz, who seeks to replace Chancellor Angela Merkel in September’s elections, called for talks on Turkey joining the EU’s customs union to be suspended, saying that Erdoğan was “every day testing the limits of how far he can go.”

The German Journalists’ Union warned journalists critical of Ankara to have German police check their Interpol records before travelling abroad.

“To our knowledge, our colleague has done nothing wrong,” said Frank Überall, the union’s president.

The German section of the PEN literary network said charges against Akhanlı center on a crime committed while he wasn’t in Turkey. The group said it believes the arrest warrant against Akhanlı to be politically motivated, citing his writings about the mass killing of Armenians in Turkey in 1915.

Merkel has been cautious in her criticism of Erdoğan despite Ankara’s arrests of German citizens. Critics say she is beholden to him because Turkey stands in the way of another wave of Syrian war refugees arriving in Europe, as they did in 2015.

Akhanlı, detained in the 1980s and 1990s in Turkey for opposition activities, including running a leftist newspaper, fled Turkey in 1991 and has lived and worked in the German city of Cologne since 1995.

On Friday, Erdoğan urged the 3 million or so people of Turkish background living in Germany to “teach a lesson” to Germany’s main parties by boycotting them in the elections.