A man is facing up to five years in jail in the north for “insulting the president” after referring to Turkish Cypriot leader Ersin Tatar as a “circus monkey” in a social media post, according to reports on Thursday.

Newspaper Yeniduzen wrote that 57-year-old Erol Baycan will appear in court on Friday over the post, which he had reshared in August 2022.

The post was originally written by another social media user, and read: “Our circus monkey, which is kept in its cage, has escaped from his home in Nicosia. He is very clownish and friendly. Anyone who sees him is kindly requested to inform his owner, the Turkish embassy”.

Below the text was a picture of Tatar.

Baycan reshared the post, writing “gunaydin, galimera”, the word for “good morning” in Turkish and an approximation of the same word in Greek.

On Thursday, he spoke to Yeniduzen about the post and the case case.

“I woke up in the morning, looked at my phone, and saw the post. I was dying of laughter. It was a post on a Facebook page. I shared it. A case was filed against me, and for two and a half years, I have been going to the police station once a week,” he said.

He added that prosecution lawyers had attempted to ban him from travelling abroad until the case had concluded, but that “this request was not deemed appropriate by the judge”.

“The judge pointed out my work, my family, my children. Otherwise, I would have been banned from going abroad,” he said.

In addition, he said, the prosecution attempted to file charges of “forming a secret alliance to overthrow the regime”, but that this had been withdrawn because no evidence had been found.

He added that he had been called by the police around a month after he reshared the post.

“They said, ‘there is a complaint against you, come to the police station’. I went. When I got to the station, all the police were laughing. They took my statement. I did not write anything. I just reshared it and wrote, ‘gunaydin, galimera’ on it. I didn’t know that sharing the post was a crime, either. I said, ‘if it’s forbidden, I apologise’,” he said.

He then added that in his view, the case against him is part of a wider squeeze on freedom of speech in the north.

“We are used to such things now. We have no right to speak, criticise, or comment. You cannot express your own independent ideas. When you go beyond fixed ideas, you become a Greek Cypriot fan and an enemy of the Turks. We will think and speak like them, we will be obedient like them. Then, we will be ‘exemplary citizens’. However, if we seek our rights, criticise, and tell the truth, then we will be ‘terrorists’.”