Turkish authorities have detained 132 people in two separate operations across multiple provinces in the latest wave of a years-long crackdown on alleged members of the faith-based Gülen movement, according to government statements and state media on Monday.
Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya said on X that 81 people were detained in 16 provinces in coordinated raids that included Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir, Diyarbakir and Balikesir. He said some of those in custody were public officials. Yerlikaya said the suspects were identified based on digital material obtained from a confidential informant.
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.
Prosecutors allege that some of the suspects were part of what the government describes as a clandestine network inside Turkey’s police force. Authorities say the group organized regular meetings between alleged movement members and serving officers.
Investigators also claim that the suspects used ByLock, an encrypted messaging application, and were listed in the records of companies that authorities say were linked to the movement.
ByLock, once widely available online, has been considered a secret tool of communication among supporters of the movement since the coup attempt on July 15, 2016, despite the lack of any evidence that ByLock messages were related to the abortive putsch.
The latest detentions come despite a landmark ruling from the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights in September 2023 that found the use of ByLock not to constitute a criminal offense. The Grand Chamber ruled in the case of former teacher Yüksel Yalçınkaya that the use of the ByLock application was not an offense in itself and did not constitute sufficient evidence for an arrest.
In a separate case authorities detained 51 suspects. Twenty-three of the suspects are civil servants, while 28 work in the private sector. Police carried out raids in 13 provinces including Istanbul.
Prosecutors accused those suspects of having senior roles in what authorities describe as a clandestine network of the movement within the police. The authorities said the case relied on statements from a cooperating witness, records of what prosecutors describe as sequential phone calls between alleged members through payphones and the use of ByLock.
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 call all his contacts consecutively. 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 that 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.
