A former sewing and embroidery teacher dismissed by an emergency decree following a 2016 coup attempt over alleged links to the faith-based Gülen movement was arrested in Edirne on Friday on terrorism-related accusations, the TR724 news website reported.
Fatma Aşık was allegedly attempting to flee to Greece when she was detained. A court subsequently ordered her arrest and sent her to Edirne Prison.
Aşık had been appointed to the Nevşehir Public Education Center in July 2016 but was dismissed by an emergency decree issued on September 1, 2016, as part of sweeping purges following the coup attempt.
An arrest warrant was issued for Aşık in October 2016. Her trial began after the Nevşehir 2nd High Criminal Court accepted her indictment in 2019 on accusations of membership in a terrorist organization over alleged links to the Gülen movement. She had remained at large since then.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has targeted the Gülen movement, a worldwide civic initiative inspired by the ideas of Muslim 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 designated the movement as a terrorist organization in May 2016, intensifying a sweeping crackdown after the 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.
Photographs of Aşık taken by gendarmes at a gendarmerie facility following her detention were distributed to the media. Some pro-government media outlets that published the images portrayed Aşık as guilty of terrorism-related offenses although her trial is still ongoing.
Following the coup attempt of July 15, 2016, the Turkish government declared a state of emergency that remained in effect until July 19, 2018. During this period, the government carried out a purge of state institutions under the pretext of an anti-coup fight by issuing a number of government decrees. More than 113,000 civil servants and 4,362 judges and prosecutors were dismissed over alleged links to terrorist organizations, while more than 26,000 members of the armed forces were expelled from the military for alleged membership in or relationships with “terrorist organizations” by emergency decree-laws subject to neither judicial nor parliamentary scrutiny.
According to the latest figures from the justice ministry, more than 127,000 people have been convicted of alleged links to the movement since 2016, with 10,485 still in prison and legal proceedings ongoing against 83,404 individuals.
