Yusuf Lerik, a former police chief, was sent to prison on Monday in the southern city of Adana to serve a sentence of six years, three months on a conviction of links to the faith-based Gülen movement.
According to Turkish media, Lerik was charged with using the encrypted messaging application ByLock to communicate with members of the movement as well as organizing meetings on behalf of the movement,now considered a terrorist organization by the government.He was dismissed from his position with the police force in 2015 over alleged links to Gülen movement.
Officers with the Anti-Terrorism Branch of the Adana Police Department detained Lerik walking on the street near his home in the Belediye evleri neighborhood of the Çukurova district to remand him to prison to begin his sentence.
Although the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has in several cases made clear that use of the ByLock does not constitute a criminal offense, following a coup attempt in 2016, the Turkish government accepted use of the application, which was widely available on Apple’s App Store and the Google Play Store, to identify and arrest alleged followers of the movement on charges of membership in a terrorist organization.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been targeting followers of the Gülen movement, a faith-based group inspired by the late Muslim cleric Fethullah Gülen, since corruption investigations revealed in December 2013 implicated then-Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan as well as some members of his family and his inner circle.
Dismissing the investigations as a Gülenist coup and conspiracy against his government, Erdoğan designated the movement as a terrorist organization and began to target its members. He intensified the crackdown on the movement following a coup attempt on July 15, 2016, which he accused Gülen of masterminding. Gülen and the movement strongly deny involvement in the abortive putsch or any terrorist activity.
Following the coup attempt, the Turkish government declared a state of emergency and carried out a massive purge of state institutions under the pretext of an anti-coup fight. More than 130,000 public servants, including at least 4,156 judges and prosecutors, as well as over 24,000members of the armed forces were summarily removed from their jobs for alleged membership in or relationships with “terrorist organizations” by emergency decree-laws subject to neither judicial nor parliamentary scrutiny.
Since the coup attempt, more than 705,172 people have been investigated on terrorism related charges due to their alleged links to the movement. There are at least 13,251 people in prison who are being held in pretrial detention or convicted of terrorism charges in Gülen-linked trials.
