Turkish authorities have detained 121 individuals across the country over the past two weeks as part of a continuing crackdown on the faith-based Gülen movement, Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya announced on Monday.
Yerlikaya said on X that suspects have been taken into custody in police operations across 37 provinces, including Ankara, İstanbul and İzmir.
Of those detained 58 were arrested, while 29 were released under judicial supervision and investigations continue for the remainder.
The detainees are accused of engaging in activities linked to the Gülen movement, contacting members of the movement via pay phones and disseminating propaganda on social media. Yerlikaya also claimed that some detainees had used ByLock, an encrypted messaging application once widely available on Apple’s App Store and Google Play that Turkish authorities claim served as a secret communication tool for Gülen supporters.
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 the 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.
According to the latest figures from the justice ministry, more than 126,000 people have been convicted for alleged links to the movement since 2016, with 11,085 still in prison. Legal proceedings are ongoing for over 24,000 individuals, while another 58,000 remain under active 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.
