Erdogan in eavesdropping row ahead of Turkish vote.

Summary: Evidence of electronic eavesdropping on a political party just over a week before an election has given opposition leaders ammunition to question the state of Turkey's democracy under Prime MinisterRecep Tayyip Erdogan.

ISTANBUL: Evidence of electronic eavesdropping on a political party just over a week before an election has given opposition leaders ammunition to question the state of Turkey's democracy under Prime MinisterRecep Tayyip Erdogan.

Controversy flared around Erdogan ahead of June 12 elections after he said earlier this week that opposition parties were ganging up to stop his AK Party from winning more seats in the Kurdish southeast, and that a recording would be released to prove it.

"I think the voice recordings will be published today or tomorrow," Erdogan said in a televised campaign speech in the southeastern city of Diyarbakir Wednesday. The recordings were released Thursday.

The frank admission of foreknowledge stunned some political commentators in a country where many people avoid talking on the phone about politics for fear that someone is listening in.

"I was frozen for a moment when I heard him say this on television," Murat Yetkin wrote in Radikal newspaper Friday. "The prime minister was announcing a recording of a conversation between two members of another political party and was saying it would be released on the Internet soon," Yetkin said in a column that drew parallels with the Watergate scandal that brought down U.S. President Richard Nixon in 1974.

The recording at the center of the row allegedly caught two members of the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Part discussing plans for strategic voting by BDP supporters to help a rival nationalist party stop the AK winning more seats in the Elazig constituency.

The BDP is regularly accused of links to Kurdish militants.

The leader of the center-left main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) seized on the recording to attack what he called "a wiretapping government" and Erdogan.

"You are the prime minister. How can you face the people and tell them an illegal recording is being released?" asked CHP chief Kemal Kilicdaroglu during an election rally in Bartin Thursday.

One of the BDP officials, whose voice was said to have been recorded, insisted there had been no such conversation and the tape was a fake created by intelligence agents working for Erdogan.

Meanwhile, Turkey's Air Force Academy commander was jailed early Friday with three other officers charged with seeking to overthrow the government in a 2003 plot in which more than 200 officers are accused.

After three hours of questioning, an Istanbul court ordered Air Force Aacademy commander Major General Ismail Tas, two colonels and a lieutenant be sent to a military jail in the city, state-run Anatolian news agency reported.

Earlier this week General Bilgin Balanli, commander of Turkey's military academies, became the highest-ranking serving officer among those charged with involvement in the alleged conspiracy, dubbed "Operation Sledgehammer."

Twelve serving generals have now been arrested over the plot, which purportedly included plans to bomb historic mosques in Istanbul and trigger conflict with Greece. Defendants say the documents presented by the prosecution were part of a war game scenario used in a military seminar and that other documents were faked.

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