An employee of the pro-Kurdish DIHA news agency in his office in Istanbul on 30 October. Photograph: Ozan Kose/AFP/Getty

Turkish authorities have passed more emergency decrees shutting down 15 media outlets, including one of the world’s only women’s news agencies, over alleged links with "terrorist organisations”. 

Police also detained the editor-in-chief of the opposition Cumhuriyet newspaper in raids early on Monday morning and said homes of the paper’s executives and writers were being searched, broadcaster CNN Turk and other media reported.

No reason was given for the detention of editor Murat Sabuncu or the searches, which followed the issuing of emergency decree 675 late on Saturday. The decree ordered the shutdown of 10 newspapers, two news agencies and three magazines. It brought the total number of media outlets closed since the coup attempt in July to more than 160.

Most of the media organisations that were closed late on Saturday had head offices in the predominantly Kurdish south-east.

More than 10,000 civil servants were also sacked as part of the crackdown over alleged links to the US-based cleric Fethullah Gülen, whom the government blames for the bloody putsch.

"The police came around 4am on Sunday morning and sealed the office,” said Beritan Canözer, a journalist in Diyarbakır for Jinha, the news agency staffed entirely by women. "We have not received a court order. There have not been any official justifications for this measure. Nobody explained anything to us.”

Canözer, who was detained last December while reporting on a demonstration in Diyarbakır because police decided she looked "too excited”, underlined that the shutdown would not spell the end to Jinha’s work. "We will find other ways to inform the public,” she said. "We will continue to report … They cannot silence us.”

Rights groups have harshly criticised the recent crackdown on press freedom in Turkey.

According to independent media platform P24, 99 journalists have been formally arrested since the botched military intervention, turning Turkey once again into the world’s leading jailor of reporters. Thousands of journalists have lost their jobs. Hundreds of government-issued press accreditations have been cancelled, and an unknown number of journalists had their passports revoked, thus banning them from all foreign travel.

Almost 2,000 academics and teachers were also among those sacked via the emergency decrees, many of whom were members of the leftist teachers’ union Eğitim-Sen.

A state of emergency, announced on 20 July, has recently been extended for another three months until January. The measure allows President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the AKP cabinet to bypass parliament, rule via decree, and suspend rights and freedoms as they deem necessary.

According to state-run news agency Anadolu, more than 37,000 people were formally arrested. 100,000 more civil servants were fired or suspended during recent purges.