A former teacher was jailed on Tuesday on terrorism charges due to her alleged links to the faith-based Gülen movement despite her appeal for release to care for her blind and mentally disabled 8-year-old son, according to the TR724 news website.
Venhar Can, previously convicted on terrorism charges, had been released pending a retrial after the Supreme Court of Appeals overturned the verdict. Fearing she wouldn’t be able to care for her child if imprisoned, she attempted to flee to Greece with her family but was caught and detained on November 2, then sent to Edirne Prison.
She is the mother of three, including 8-year-old İhsan, who is blind and suffers from physical and mental disabilities.
Her husband, Kaan Can, said they submitted a petition to the court detailing their children’s situation but that the judges simply didn’t care.
Can was convicted of membership in a terrorist organization based on activities that Turkish courts consider indicative of Gülen movement affiliation, such as working at a movement-affiliated private school, depositing money in the now-shuttered Bank Asya, statements from secret or cooperating witnesses and using 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.
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.
Kaan Can, also a former teacher at the same school, previously served more than seven years in prison on similar charges. Now working in a factory in Turkey’s central Konya province, he recalled that his wife was eight months pregnant with their disabled son when he was arrested.
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.
