Turkish prosecutors have ordered the detention of four civil servants from the Ministry of Treasury and Finance and the state-owned BOTAŞ energy company as part of an ongoing crackdown on the faith-based Gülen movement, the BirGün daily reported.
Police launched operations in Ankara to detain the four after prosecutors issued warrants for them. They face terrorism-related accusations over claims that they stayed in shared apartments linked by prosecutors to the movement while preparing for public service entrance exams and used 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.
In addition to the thousands who were jailed, scores of other Gülen movement followers had to flee Turkey to avoid the government crackdown.
