Baku-APA. A leaked voice recording purportedly of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip ErdoÄŸan organizing the dissemination of video footage of former main opposition Republic People's Party (CHP) leader Deniz Baykal's adultery has provoked widespread criticism, including from Baykal, who made a statement on Wednesday calling on “ErdoÄŸan and the state to provide an explanation” concerning the leaked audio, APA reports quoting CIHAN agency.
Baykal said he would do what is necessary after ErdoÄŸan's explanation. Speaking to reporters in Afyonkarahisar, where he was visiting as part of the election campaigns, Baykal said, “The picture that was revealed last night is a picture that may not be explained by reason, logic, conscience and the law.”
Baykal called the sound recording a “big satanic scenario” and wanted ErdoÄŸan to immediately offer an explanation for it. “This is a very important starting point to disclose how and where all dirty games stem from in Turkey,” said Baykal.
“It is understood that a legal, democratic and political problem exists,” the former CHP leader said, adding that the new situation is not something that can be covered up, whitewashed or denied with ordinary assertions. “If this event [the leaked audio] is real, these people which plotted it have no right to look in the mirror, to look me in the face. It is impossible for them to keep walking as if nothing has happened,” Baykal said.
ErdoÄŸan rejected the claims in an election campaign speech in Düzce on Wednesday. He said he had ordered his ministers to do everything to remove the video from the Internet. “We are not so shameless to commit such mischief as is prohibited by our beliefs,” said ErdoÄŸan. ErdoÄŸan had made this claim before, but Baykal's lawyers rejected it, saying they had struggled to block access to the video uploaded to the Internet through court orders and that they received little or no help from the government.
The sound recording stirred harsh reactions on social media platforms. Thousands of people on Twitter, access to which was recently restricted by the government, argued that the sex tape intrigue, which compelled Baykal to resign after a massive public scandal in 2010, was plotted by ErdoÄŸan to get rid of his archrival on the political stage.
ErdoÄŸan's voice cannot be heard clearly in the recording, and a note included with the recording states it was intercepted through covert audio surveillance, which explains possibly the noise and scratch interference throughout the sound recording. But in some versions, cleaned up by audio engineers using scratch filters, ErdoÄŸan's words are largely audible. Only the prime minister's voice is heard in the recording.
The leak was uploaded onto YouTube under an account named “DLMHACK,” ostensibly belonging to a leftist group as the logo has a hammer and a sickle in place of the letter D of its name. The YouTube user claimed that they seized the recording from the email account of ErdoÄŸan's adviser Mustafa Varank, hinting that the recording was carried out by the prime minister's own associate in the first place.
In the recording, which seems to be a collage of different speeches, the voice attributed to ErdoÄŸan instructs his men to capture Baykal in flagrante delicto and spread the footage through the media and Internet.
“Unfortunately, there are very indecent and immoral things. There has to be an intervention here. The CHP has gone completely off the rails,” ErdoÄŸan is allegedly heard telling the people in the room.
“We have such things in our hands, a document to be published. If I give it to you, how would you do it? … Are you passing them to websites?” says the voice, and after a pause, possibly a point at which parts of the original recording were edited out, he goes on: “All right, let's do it like this, then. Let me first save it to a hard disk. But the recording is very bad. Can't he [Baykal] say they are fake and this and that?”
CHP leader Kemal KılıçdaroÄŸlu also lashed out at the prime minister over the allegations during a press conference in Manisa's Akhisar district, accusing the prime minister of being behind the sex tape scandal. KılıçdaroÄŸlu said such viciousness had not been witnessed in the world, adding that ErdoÄŸan's alleged involvement in the plot was possibly the reason why the actors behind this conspiracy had not been pinpointed yet. “He is the lead actor. A person who brings indecency to these levels may not sit in the seat of the prime minister. This event is yet another version of the US Watergate scandal,” KılıçdaroÄŸlu said.
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