Under the utmost secrecy, a woman was convicted of espionage at the regional court in Wels on Wednesday: The Upper Austrian woman with Turkish roots (45) is alleged to have gathered sensitive information about Kurdish communities in Austria and passed it on to a Turkish secret service “to the detriment of Austria”.
The defendant in a spectacular criminal case that was exposed in autumn 2020 has just been tried in Upper Austria: The 45-year-old Upper Austrian woman with Turkish roots is alleged to have spied on Kurds living in this country and to have passed on sensitive data to an intelligence service in Turkey. For the protection of the accused, the highest level of secrecy was applied at the trial, the public was excluded from the proceedings.
The case caused a great stir in Austria and Turkey after it was exposed and also kept politicians more busy: even Interior Minister Karl Nehammer reported on the espionage affair at a press conference, the accusation of spying on behalf of the Turkish secret service and the arrest of the woman then also caused foreign policy quarrels with Turkey.
Specifically, the accused is said to have become a spy after her arrest in Turkey – on the one hand out of fear, but on the other hand also in return for payment. From September 2018 to June 202, she is said to have continuously passed on information to the Turkish national intelligence service Milli Istihbarat Teskilati (MIT), especially sensitive data about the Kurdish communities in Austria. No information about the background of the espionage activity has been made public so far, but it may very well have been a topic during the trial. The woman confessed and the judge sentenced her to twelve months imprisonment, four of them unconditional. The defendant has already accepted the sentence, the prosecution did not give a statement. The sentence is not legally binding.
https://exxpress.at/urteil-in-geheimprozess-in-ooe-12-jahre-haft-fuer-tuerkei-spionin/