Ayşe Önal

Ayşe Önal (born 1955) is a Turkish journalist and writer. A former editor of Nokta, in 2000 she moved to London and became foreign correspondent for Kanal 7, before moving to Akşam and Show TV in 2003.

Career Önal worked as a psychological counselor at a juvenile prison in the early 1980s, but was fired when the government found out she was "kind of a leftist". She joined the weekly Nokta in 1984 as a political reporter, and became its editor-in-chief. In this position she was attacked with a firearm in February 1994, together with a Nokta correspondent. Onal graduated with a degree in Psychology in 1978, and worked for treatment of condemned children in prison for three years. After being forced to leave due to her different opinion, she started her journalism life in Nokta Weekly.

Önal was one of the first people to write about JİTEM, for Dinç Bilgin's Ateş newspaper on 2 July 1994 . Önal had learned about it from Veli Küçük after being introduced to him through MIT spy and fellow journalist, Tuncay Güney. Önal and Küçük's meeting did not go well, and Önal vowed to write about it. She followed through, and was promptly fired, along with nineteen of her coworkers. In 1994 Turkish Hizballah published a death threat against her, leading Önal to go into hiding in Cyprus for three months.