Turkey’s president has lashed out at government critics over a video that allegedly showed a cargo of Turkish arms intercepted en route to Syria for the foreign-backed militants.

Addressing a gathering in Istanbul on Sunday, Recep Tayyip Erdogan described the publishing of the video footage as an act of “espionage.”

The footage purportedly shows trucks belonging to Turkey’s spy agency, loaded with weapons bound for the Takfiri terrorist groups operating in neighboring Syria.

In January 2014, Turkish border police said its forces had found weapons and personnel of the Turkish National Intelligence Organization, also known as MIT, on board trucks bound for Syria. Turkish daily newspaper, Cumhuriyet, on Friday posted footage of the incident shot by a bystander on its website.

Cumhuriyet revealed in its report that the trucks were carrying mortar shells, grenade launchers and tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition hidden in the trucks under medicine boxes labeled “fragile.”

The center-left daily newspaper’s report prompted Ankara to immediately seek a gag order from a judge to intimidate critics in order to contain the fallout from the scandal.

In the most recent in a series of such acts, Turkish prosecutors have launched an anti-terrorism investigation into Cumhuriyet’s report.

The daily’s editor-in-chief, Can Dündar, said he is being targeted in the investigation for publishing “information that must have remained confidential.”

XLS/HSN/SS