The family of a man who died of leukemia in 2024 after serving more than seven years in prison for alleged ties to the faith-based Gülen movement has come forward publicly, saying poor conditions during his incarceration severely damaged his health and contributed to his death.
The relatives of Akif Şimşek, speaking out publicly for the first time to the TR724 news website on the anniversary of his death, say he entered prison healthy but emerged physically and psychologically broken. They allege that years spent in overcrowded, unsanitary cells with delayed access to medical care accelerated the onset of the cancer that would later kill him.
“Akif told us many times that getting proper medical attention was nearly impossible,” his brother said. “He lived in conditions where no one could stay healthy. He had only one kidney since birth. That prison life destroyed him.”
Şimşek, 42, was released from prison on November 4, 2021, after serving his sentence. Within months, he was diagnosed with advanced-stage leukemia. Despite undergoing chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant, he died on November 10, 2024, leaving behind a wife and two children.
Şimşek was arrested on July 17, 2017, in the aftermath of a 2016 failed coup, during a sweeping crackdown on individuals accused of ties to the Gulen movement.
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 the abortive putsch in July of the same year that he accused Gülen of masterminding.
He was convicted by the İzmir 3rd High Criminal Court on charges that included depositing money in Bank Asya, using the encrypted ByLock messaging app, sending his child to a school later shut down by the state and allegedly participating in religious gatherings.
Since the coup attempt in 2016, the Turkish government has accepted such activities as having an account at the now-shuttered Bank Asya, one of Turkey’s largest commercial banks at the time; using the ByLock, an encrypted messaging app that was available on Apple’s App Store and Google Play; and subscribing to the now-shut-down Zaman daily or other publications affiliated with members of the movement as benchmarks for identifying and arresting alleged followers of the Gülen movement on charges of membership in a terrorist organization.
Rights groups have raised concerns for years about the Turkish judiciary’s reliance on such evidence in post-coup trials, with many convictions based on actions that were legal at the time they occurred.
