A German journalist who was arrested in Turkey denied terror-related accusations as a trial against her opened in a Turkish court Wednesday, AP reported.

Mesale Tolu, a German citizen with Turkish roots, stands accused of engaging in terrorist propaganda and being a member of a banned left-wing group, the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party.

In her testimony on Wednesday, Tolu rejected the accusations and said she attended the funerals “out of conscience.”

The 33-year-old was on trial at a courthouse in the outskirts of Istanbul together with 18 other defendants. She was the first of 11 German or German-Turkish citizens arrested in Turkey over the past year to go on trial. Berlin considers them to be “political prisoners.”