Yasin Özdil, the former PR director of the “Orizont” Lyceum in Chisinau, was sentenced to 12 years in prison. This is the fifth conviction among the seven Turkish citizens expelled from Moldova in September 2018.

Hasan Barış, principal of Orizont’s Durlești Branch, said that Yasin Özdil was sentenced “on charges of being a member of a terrorist organization, but no concrete evidence was presented in this regard.” According to the principal, two more people are awaiting sentencing.

The seven foreign nationals, teachers and administrators of the Orizont network of lyceums, were declared undesirable and expelled from Moldova in September 2018. The reason given by the Security and Intelligence Service then is that they were “suspected of links with an Islamist group believed to carry out illegal actions in several countries.” The teachers’ families and colleagues held numerous protest actions demanding their release.

In June 2019, the ECHR ruled that Moldova violated the rights of the seven Turkish citizens when deporting them to Turkey.