Turkey election authority denies being source of data leak

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ISTANBUL: Turkey’s election authority has denied that a massive data leak which saw the personal information of 50 million citizens posted online came from its system, local media reported Saturday.

The government said the data appeared to be that shared with different political parties ahead of elections in 2009.

“Engineers did investigations. Although it is compatible with the records we have, there was not any leak from our system,” the head of the election commission Sadi Guven Guven told state-run Anadolu agency.

“A leak would be almost impossibly difficult. Our system is very strongly protected.”

Ankara federal prosecutors on Wednesday opened an investigation into the data spill which risks exposing most of Turkey’s 78 million citizens to identity theft and fraud.