The popular Turkish journalist is among several suspects on trial over alleged coup plots whom the opposition has fielded as top candidates in the June 12 polls, adding a new twist to the massive investigation that has polarised Turkey.

Behind bars for more than two years and risking a life sentence, Balbay believes he is the victim of a "score-settling" campaign the ruling Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP) is waging against the secular republic.

"I am under a political attack in a judicial guise.... I want to respond to my accusers from the same rostrum in parliament," he wrote from a prison near Istanbul in response to AFP questions relayed through his lawyer.

Jailed candidates are expected to walk free once they win parliamentary seats, which come complete with judicial immunity, leading critics to suggest they are seeking to evade justice.

A total of about 500 people, among them army commanders and prominent intellectuals, have been charged over a series of alleged plots to destabilise and overthrow the AKP, which came to power in 2002 and is on course to win a third straight term.

Under way since 2007, the probes have landed some 30 generals, about a tenth of the total, in jail, humbling the once-omnipotent army after its ouster of four governments in the past and raising hope of a Turkey closer to EU norms.

But the mounting zeal of investigators, which culminated recently in the arrest of more journalists and the banning of a yet-unpublished book, has stoked fear that the probes have degenerated into a campaign to silence government opponents. Prosecutors are yet to secure convictions.

The AKP is playing "a democracy game in which doping, fouling and off-side is free, and the referee is expelled from the pitch," Balbay, a senior writer for the secularist daily Cumhuriyet, said.

Prosecutors argue the journalist is a leading member of Ergenekon, a "terrorist group" that plotted to lay the ground for a coup through strategies ranging from media propaganda and street protests to bombings and assassinations.

Their key evidence is his diaries which recount discussions with military officials on how to weaken and oust the AKP. Balbay has disowned the digital documents as fabrication.

Jurist Ilhan Cihaner is another of the four defendants vying for parliament on the list of the main oppposition Republican People's Party (CHP).

Cihaner, who spent four months in custody, risks 10 years in jail on charges of collaboration with the military, as a prosecutor in eastern Turkey two years ago, in a plan to discredit the AKP.

His case has emerged as one of the most controversial in a dramatic chain of events that saw rival jurists clash, and police and secret agents pull guns on each other.

Cihaner says he became a target when he defied government pressure to close an investigation into influential Islamic communities that had produced evidence of fraud implicating also AKP members.

"There is popular expectation for a stronger struggle against all this unlawfulness," he told AFP.

"It's virtually despotism.... We are going through times reminiscent of Kafka's Trial," he said, referring to the literary masterpiece about the surreal ordeal of a man accused of a crime that was never specified.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has angrily slammed the candidacy of the defendants, calling the CHP "a liaison office for criminal gangs."

The second largest opposition party, MHP, also has a candidate in prison -- a retired general on trial for an alleged coup plan codenamed Sledgehammer. And the plot's alleged mastermind is running as an independent, along with some other suspects.

Turkey's main Kurdish party, for its part, has fielded six candidates who are in jail awaiting trial for links to separatist rebels.

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