Turkish Cypriot journalist Canan Onurer said she has received death threats after refusing to retract a report on alleged criminal activity involving individuals who had recently arrived on the island from Turkey.

“On the morning of September 8, I woke up to a message containing screenshots of a news report about a theft in the Demirhan region in February that I had written about,” she told the Cyprus Mail.

The story concerned a case of three individuals who had stolen alcohol and chocolate from several supermarkets near the northern Nicosia district village of Trachoni.

Onurer said that soon after reading the message, she started receiving several calls from a British telephone number, demanding that she remove the article, threatening that if she did not take it down “they would resort to other means.”

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After telling the senders to stop bothering her, Onurer said she received messages with further threats.

“You have 24 hours. If you do not remove the article, we will not let you or anyone near you in Cyprus live,” she recited one of the messages as having said.

Onurer said she then went to the police to report the incident, where she received another call and handed over the phone to the officers, with the caller admitting to the threats.

She added that through her own research, she later found out that the number behind the calls was linked to Beratcan Gokdemir, the leader of a Turkish gang called the “Daltonlar”.

“The greatest problem highlighted by this incident is the uncontrolled entry into the north,” Onurer told the Cyprus Mail.

She said that the case demonstrated that gang members from Turkey were able to freely access the north and “engage in all kinds of criminal activities, including armed attacks.”

“At this moment, I may be the journalist who was threatened, but in reality, this threat was directed to all people living in northern Cyprus,” she said.

“Unless a different [migration] policy is developed, the north will become a place where criminal gangs can commit crimes freely.”

Turkish Cypriot press workers’ union Basin-Sen expressed its solidarity with Onurer, saying that “no threat will prevent journalists from doing their duty” and adding that it would be closely following the case “until the end.”

Basin-Sen warned that there was a “a systematic effort to silence and censor [journalists] through threats”.

Onurer is not the first Turkish Cypriot journalist in recent months to have reported receiving death threats.

Aysemden Akin of news website Bugun Kibris reported having been threatened in May after publishing a series of articles in which an interviewee had made allegations of a deep money-laundering and smuggling network based in Cyprus involving some of the most powerful men in Turkey.

Her interviewee, Cemil Onal, was shot dead in the Netherlands the day after she went public with the threats.