Turkish authorities on Tuesday arrested three journalists working for an opposition television channel as they prepared to go on air, the broadcaster and a journalists' union said.
The three work for Halk TV, a channel close to the main opposition social democratic party, CHP.
Presenter Seda Selek along with programme director Serhan Asker and reporter Baris Pehlivan "were arrested in the premises of the channel while they were preparing the evening programme," Cafer Mahiroglu, the owner of Halk TV, and the TGS union said.
Reporter Pehlivan said that he had already served "five stints in prison in 2022 years under the AKP", the party of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Istanbul's powerful CHP opposition mayor Ekrem Imamoglu slammed the arrests.
"Injustice has become an ordinary practice of power... To hold injustice and illegality to account has become a crime," he wrote on X.
Turkish journalists' union TGS in a statement branded the arrests "a new shameful page in the history of the press" in Turkey and "the embodiment of the pressures exerted on our profession".
Media rights watchdog Reporters Without Borders ranked Turkey in 158th place out of 180 countries on its press freedom index in 2024.