A Turkish teacher imprisoned over alleged links to the Gülen movement has been returned to prison after a brief hospitalization, even as doctors said she required emergency surgery and that her blood levels had fallen below life-sustaining thresholds, her husband said.
According to the TR724 news website, Asuman Birinci, a physics teacher held at an Antalya prison in southern Turkey for nearly 21 months, was hospitalized on February 20, given emergency blood transfusions and told she needed surgery — yet was sent back to her cell only days later.
The case marks a sharp escalation from weeks earlier, when the family first raised the alarm after prison authorities failed to act on blood test results showing critically low hemoglobin and ferritin levels. At the time, the prison doctor told her she could “live with those values” and refused to refer her for further treatment.
By February 18 her husband, Eyüp Birinci, said her condition had become alarming. “Her color had gone completely yellow. She couldn’t get up from where she was,” he said after visiting her that day. “Her situation was truly dire.”
It took written petitions to multiple government institutions before she was finally sent to a hospital on February 20, where doctors found her blood values below what they described as the threshold for sustaining life. Doctors told the family she required immediate surgery. She received five units of red blood cells and two units of white blood cells over three days.
On the evening of February 22, she was sent back to prison.
“The transfusions won’t be enough,” Eyüp Birinci said. “Her blood values were already low before she was detained, and she needed regular transfusions even then. Inside prison, her condition has gotten significantly worse.”
He said his wife had suffered from severe iron-deficiency anemia long before her imprisonment and required blood supplementation roughly every six months under normal circumstances. Since entering prison, he said, she has been unable to meet even her basic daily needs.
Birinci called for her release to receive proper treatment.
Asuman Birinci is serving a six-year, three-month sentence over alleged ties to the Gülen movement and has been imprisoned for about 21 months. According to her husband, the charges stemmed from her employment at a Gülen-linked private tutoring center, enrolling her children in a Gülen-affiliated school and depositing money in the now-defunct Bank Asya, which authorities have also tied to the Gülen 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 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.
Eyüp Birinci was himself taken into custody on July 24, 2016, during a wave of arrests following the coup attempt, over alleged links to the Gülen movement. He said he was subjected to sexual assault, beatings and insults while in custody at the Antalya Police Station.
During his detention Birinci reportedly fainted from the torture and was taken to a hospital on July 29 of the same year, where doctors discovered internal bleeding. According to his family, Birinci’s colon was ruptured from torture inflicted with a police baton. However, doctors did not issue a medical report documenting the alleged torture and instead attributed his injuries to a fall down a staircase.
A fellow detainee who shared a cell with Birinci for several days testified to witnessing his physical and psychological deterioration, saying that Birinci returned from one interrogation session in visibly worse condition.
