The case against four left-wing activists who were accused of conspiring to vandalise posters declaring love for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been dropped, more than five years after the posters were vandalised.

The posters, which read ‘Love Erdogan’, had appeared around the north in March 2021 in response to a billboard in New York reading ‘Stop Erdogan’.

They had been commissioned and paid for by Erdogan’s AK Party’s Famagusta youth branch.

One of the posters was then defaced with the word ‘Diablo’, with the youth branch reporting the vandalism to the police.

After the case was dropped, one of the accused, Abdullah Korkmazhan, said that “the prosecutor’s office withdrew the fabricated case”, and that “we have made the applications to get back our phones which were stolen five years ago”.

He also made reference to the fact that in 2024, two of the four were accused of having “conspired” to deface the posters without having physically gone to the scene.

To this, the four’s defence lawyer Mine Atli had said that “if the prosecution started opening cases based on this logic, the list of defendants would be very much longer indeed”.