Turkey summons another US consulate employee as crisis deepens

WASHINGTON - 10 October 2017: Turkish prosecutors said Monday that they had summoned an employee of the US consulate in Istanbul to testify in a criminal matter, only days after the government’s arrest of another consulate employee set off a bitter and unusually public feud between the Trump administration and the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Turkish authorities provided few details about the latest warrant, and a spokesman for the US Embassy in Ankara declined to comment on the case, the Washington Post said.

But with its timing, the summons amounted to another provocation in an accelerating crisis between Turkey and the United States that has raised concerns about the future of their alliance and has stunned officials and observers in both countries.

The latest episode escalated Sunday, when the US Embassy announced that it was immediately suspending the issuing of non-immigrant visas at its missions in Turkey.

The embassy statement cited security concerns, but the surprise move was widely seen as a response to Turkey’s arrest last week of Metin Topuz, a Turkish employee of the US consulate in Istanbul, on espionage charges.

Turkey’s embassy in Washington responded hours later with identical restrictions — suddenly upending the plans of countless Turkish and American tourists, students, business people and others who did not already possess the necessary visas for travel.

The spiraling argument has exposed deep divides between Erdogan’s government and the Trump administration and undermined months of effort by both sides to paper over their differences with public expressions of solidarity.