‘Turkish hackers’ target Amnesty and Unicef Twitter accounts

Turkey has been in slow-moving talks on European Union membership for over a decade. The Netherlands is holding national elections today. The tweets are reportedly related to a date, April 16.

The tweets included a swastika and described the attack as a “little Ottoman slap”.

In addition to that, Twitter confirmed that it had taken action on its side. The DDoS attack was most likely carried out by a Turkish hacktivist group that appears to be motivated by Turkish nationalism.

Some cybersecurity experts suggested that Twitter Counter, which helps users measure analytics, may be the third party app that was breached. Among the victims were Amnesty International, the football club Borussia Dortmund and tennis legend Boris Becker.

A large number of emigre Turks live in Europe, mostly in the Netherlands and Germany, and Erdogan is looking to gain their support in the upcoming referendum.

Erdogan had twice over the weekend accused North Atlantic Treaty Organisation ally the Netherlands of acting like the Nazis, comments that sparked outrage in a country bombed and occupied by German forces in the Second World War. European Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker said he was “scandalized” by the Turkish government’s Nazi comments.

Erdogan sought to rub salt into the wound Tuesday by bringing up the Srebrenica massacre of 1995, where Dutch UN peacekeepers failed to prevent the killing of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims by Bosnian Serbs.

After Erdogan used the same language to scold the Netherlands, Merkel said on Monday that the comparison was “completely wrong” and “banalises suffering”.

“Turkey is always concerned that the pride of its country is not injured”.

Germany’s mass-circulation Bild newspaper carried a nearly-full-page photograph of Erdogan on Wednesday, with a headline that read: “You are no democrat! You are not welcome here!”, it said on its front page.

Berlin continues to press for fair treatment of German-Turkish journalist Deniz Yucel, who was arrested in Ankara last month, and rejects as “absolutely baseless” Turkey’s claim that Yucel was working as a German spy.

“Rotterdam, the city of Erasmus, totally destroyed by the Nazis, which now has a mayor born in Morocco: If any anyone sees fascism in Rotterdam they are completely detached from reality”, Tusk told a plenary session of the European Parliament.

A week before he had accused the German government of “Nazi practices” over its banning of rallies in the country meant to show support for his increasingly authoritarian government, which has arrested thousands of academics and opposition party supporters as well as imposing bans on the use of VPNs, Tor, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.