Turkey on Tuesday jailed seven people in Kayseri province, including teachers, military officers and a police officer, after an appeals court upheld their prison sentences on conviction of alleged links to the faith-based Gülen movement, according to the TR724 news website.
Four teachers, a military officer, a noncommissioned officer and a police officer were jailed after their convictions were upheld. All seven had been dismissed from public service by an emergency decree following a failed coup in 2016.
Five of them received prison sentences of more than six years, while the remaining two were sentenced to more than seven years.
Their convictions on charges of membership in a terrorist organization were based on activities that Turkish courts have treated as evidence of Gülen movement affiliation, including membership in an association linked to the movement, depositing money in the now-closed Bank Asya and using ByLock, an encrypted messaging app, once widely available on Apple’s App Store and Google Play, that Turkish authorities claim was used as a secret communication tool for Gülen supporters.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has targeted followers of the Gülen movement, inspired by the US-based cleric Fethullah Gülen, who died in 2024, 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 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.
