Turkish authorities on Tuesday detained 60 people, including civil servants and doctors, in two operations across multiple provinces as part of an ongoing crackdown on the faith-based Gülen movement.
According to the state-run TRT Haber, in one operation led by the Mersin Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office, 43 people, including three current and 16 former civil servants dismissed by government decrees, were detained.
The detentions took place in Mersin and seven other provinces, including İstanbul and Ankara.
The detainees are accused of providing financial support to families of individuals imprisoned or dismissed from their jobs over alleged links to the movement. Legal procedures against them were initiated following their detention.
In a separate operation led by the İstanbul Police Department, officers detained 17 people, including 15 doctors working at public hospitals, across 12 provinces.
The detainees are accused of engaging in activities linked to the Gülen movement, including participating in an alleged exam preparation network tied to the movement to succeed in Turkey’s Medical Specialty Exam (TUS), contacting members through pay phones and past use of 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 movement supporters.
The so-called “payphone investigations” are based on call records. The prosecutors allege that a member of the Gülen movement used the same payphone to consecutively call their contacts. Based on that assumption, when an alleged member of the movement is found in call records, it is assumed that the 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.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has targeted 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. He dismissed the probes as a Gülenist conspiracy and later designated the movement as a terrorist organization in May 2016, intensifying a sweeping crackdown after a coup attempt in July of the same year that he accused Gülen of orchestrating. The movement denies involvement in the coup attempt or any terrorist activity.
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.
