A 38-year-old Turkish man, employed by the municipality of Edirne near the border with Greece, was deported on Saturday back to Turkey roughly three days after he was arrested and quickly tried for illegally entering Greek territory.
The man, identified as Musa Alerik, was escorted by a pair of policemen to a border crossing at the Kastanies site, very close to the site where he was detained on Wednesday.
Alerik was given a suspended five-month sentenced and fined 1,500 euros by a first instance court in the border Evros prefecture.
At his brief trial he told a judge he did not realize he had passed into Greek territory while operating a JCB-type heavy vehicle in an open field.
The incident comes in light of the continued incarceration of two Greek servicemen that inadvertantly entered Turkish territory on March 1. The pair have not been given a court date or even a specific charge sheet, while a judicial investigation by a Turkish prosecutor continues to drag on without any deadline for the filing of an indictment or conclusive findings. Three requests for the pair’s pre-trial detention have also been refused by a Turkish court.
In a related development, speaking at an unofficial summit of EU member-states’ defense ministers on Saturday, the Greek minister, Panos Kammenos, referred to an “illegal incarceration” of the two men, while stressing that the matter is not a “bilateral issue”.
He again stressed, in fact, that the two Greek soldiers were “hostages”.
