Turkish prosecutors want seven years in jail for a transgender influencer over a TikTok video showing her apparently flushing a TRY-100 banknote – worth less than GBP 5 – down the toilet.
Mika Can Raun was seized by officers from the Turkish police’s cybercrime department in Istanbul after she shared the video on her social media page.
She has now been seized for the crimes of ‘publicly insulting the memory of Ataturk’, whose image is on the banknote, and ‘insulting the symbols of state sovereignty’, because the county also bears the Turkish flag.
After she was arrested and quizzed, she claimed that she had never actually put the note down the toilet and that it had dropped on the floor.
She alleged that she had just made it look like she was flushing the note for her social media followers.
But prosecutors refused to accept her version of events and said that flushing the banknote – which bears the image of modern Turkey’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk – was an insult to the state.
The TikTok video in question shows Mika miming along to a song before seemingly dropping the TRY-100 note into the pan and flushing it away.
However, the note is never actually seen in the toilet bowl.
She told prosecutors that although she had posted the video, she had removed it an hour later and had made no other political statements since then.
She reportedly said: “I did not act with the intention of committing any disrespect or crime against the Republic of Turkey. I have no intention of insulting Ataturk or our national values.”
But despite her contrition, prosecutors are now demanding seven years in jail for Mika – whose legal name is Mikail Can Kurnaz – over the alleged act.
The influencer – who boasts more than a million followers across social networks – remains under investigation by authorities.
LGBT people widely report facing discrimination in Turkey, despite its relatively progressive stance on such issues compared to most other Muslim-majority nations.
