Hakan Fidan, the head of Turkish intelligence who exposed a Mossad network and caused a major fallout with Israel, on Monday withdrew his candidacy for the June parliamentary elections for the AK Party, the Daily Sabah newspaper reported.
Fidan, who had resigned from his post last month in order to run for parliament in the upcoming general elections, returned to his former post as intelligence chief.
"I have withdrawn my candidacy from the 25th parliamentary elections due to necessities. I will show every effort to properly carry out every duty commended to serve my country and my nation just like I have been doing so until today," Fidan said in a statement quoted by the Daily Sabah.
Fidan is a hostile figure to Israel, having taken an action that soured relations between Turkey and the Jewish state even further than they were after the infamous 2010 Mavi Marmara flotilla, in which "humanitarian" activists tried to breach Israel's legal blockade of Gaza and then used lethal weapons to assault IDF soldiers.
A media report in The Washington Post in 2013 revealed that Fidan had blown the cover of a network of Mossad-run Iranians operating on Turkish soil, in what Israel termed a clear "act of betrayal" by the erstwhile ally.
Turkey blamed Israel for the revelation by The Washington Post, claiming that Israel was trying to defame Turkey in U.S. eyes as a country tolerating terrorists.