Turkish authorities have detained 148 people in three separate operations and arrested 52 over alleged links to the faith-based Gülen movement, Turkish media reported.
Prosecutors in the western province of İzmir issued detention warrants for 88 military personnel, including active-duty and retired officers, over alleged ties to the movement. Police carried out simultaneous raids across 33 provinces and detained 60 suspects, including several district-level gendarmerie commanders.
Efforts to locate the remaining suspects were continuing.
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.
In a separate operation based in the central province of Kayseri, police on Tuesday detained 70 people in coordinated raids conducted in four provinces. Police officers seized religious books, digital materials and bank cards issued by the now-defunct Bank Asya, a lender associated with the movement.
The relatives of some detainees told local media that those taken into custody included a recently dismissed civil servant and his 20-year-old son, who were accused of participating in religious discussion meetings and alleged “restructuring” activities of the movement.
On Tuesday, police also detained 18 people, including 16 public employees, in raids conducted across eight provinces in an Istanbul-based investigation. Prosecutors said the suspects were accused of membership in the movement based on statements from cooperating suspects, records allegedly obtained from a confidential witness and alleged sequential phone call patterns that investigators say indicate covert communication methods.
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.
Separately, an Istanbul court on Monday ordered the pretrial detention of 52 tax inspectors who had been detained last week over alleged links to the movement, part of an investigation involving 93 current and former employees of the Treasury and Finance Ministry. Prosecutors said the investigation relied in part on alleged contacts traced through public payphone call records and witness statements. Courts imposed judicial supervision measures on 38 suspects and released four others after they cooperated with investigators.
According to the latest figures from the Justice Ministry, more than 126,000 people have been convicted of 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.
