Turkish prosecutors have ordered the detention of 29 people over alleged links to the faith-based Gülen movement in two separate investigations, Turkish media reported.
In the first case the Ankara Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office issued detention warrants for 16 individuals, including five active-duty officers and five former officers, in an investigation targeting the Turkish Air Force, alleging they used pay phones to contact members of the movement.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been targeting followers of the Gülen movement, inspired by the late Muslim cleric Fethullah Gülen, since corruption investigations in December 2013 implicated him as well as some members of his family and inner circle.
Dismissing the investigations as a Gülenist coup and a conspiracy against his government, Erdoğan began to target the movement’s members. He designated the movement as a terrorist organization in May 2016 and intensified the crackdown on it following an abortive putsch in July of the same year that he accused Gülen of masterminding. The movement strongly denies involvement in the coup attempt or any terrorist activity.
The so-called “payphone investigations” are based on call records. The prosecutors allege that a member of the Gülen movement used a single payphone to consecutively call all his contacts. Based on that assumption, when an alleged member of the movement is found in call records, it is assumed that other numbers called right before or after the primary call also belong to people with Gülen links. The authorities do not possess the content of the calls in question. The supposition of guilt is solely based on the order of the calls made from the phone.
In the second case, also led by the Ankara Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office, warrants were issued for 13 suspects for allegedly staying in the movement’s “study houses” to prepare for public service entrance exams and for using the encrypted ByLock messaging app.
Turkish authorities have considered ByLock, once available in Apple’s App Store and Google Play, to be a secret tool of communication among supporters of the Gülen movement since the coup attempt on July 15, 2016, despite a lack of evidence that ByLock messages were related to the abortive putsch.
In a pilot judgment in September 2023, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) ruled that Turkey had violated three articles of the European Convention on Human Rights in the case of former teacher Yüksel Yalçınkaya, who, among other things, was convicted of terrorism in Turkey due to his use of ByLock. The court said Turkey had violated Article 6 (right to a fair trial), Article 7 (no punishment without law) and Article 11 (freedom of assembly and association).
The “pilot judgment” procedure allows the court to address systematic rights violations without re-examining thousands of identical cases. After a ruling, the court forwards similar cases to the government concerned urging broader remedies.
Legal experts stressed that the Grand Chamber’s decision made clear ByLock use cannot be treated as evidence of criminal activity.
According to the latest figures from the Justice Ministry, more than 126,000 people have been convicted for alleged links to the Gülen movement since 2016, with 11,085 still in prison. Legal proceedings are ongoing for over 24,000 individuals, while another 58,000 remain under investigation nearly a decade later.
In addition to the thousands who were jailed, scores of other Gülen movement followers had to flee Turkey to avoid the government crackdown.
