A Turkish court jailed 15 people pending trial after they were detained in an Ankara-led investigation targeting 28 people accused by authorities of links to the Gülen movement, the TRT Haber state broadcaster reported Friday.
Twenty-six of the 28 suspects were detained in simultaneous operations in 15 provinces, while efforts to locate the remaining two were continuing, according to Turkish authorities. Twelve of the 28 are civil servants, although the reports did not say how many of them were among those jailed.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has targeted the faith-based Gülen movement, inspired by 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 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.
The operations were carried out by Turkey’s National Intelligence Organization (MİT) and the Ankara Police Department’s counterterrorism branch (TEM) in an investigation coordinated by the Ankara Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office.
Prosecutors accuse the suspects of involvement in what Turkish authorities describe as clandestine Gülen movement networks within public institutions, including an alleged system for arranging marriages among people associated with the movement.
According to TRT Haber, citing information from the investigation, authorities examined records from a ByLock account they attribute to a woman accused of membership in the movement and said the material contained information about marriage arrangements. The report also referred to unspecified additional evidence gathered during the investigation.
Turkish authorities have considered ByLock, an encrypted messaging app that was available on Apple’s App Store and Google Play, to be a secret tool of communication among supporters of the Gülen movement since the coup attempt on July 15, 2016, despite a lack of evidence that ByLock messages were related to the abortive putsch.
Although the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has in many cases made clear that use of the ByLock messaging app does not constitute a criminal offense, detentions and arrests of individuals continue in Turkey for their alleged use of the ByLock application.
After questioning by police, all 26 detainees were referred to court, where judges ordered 15 of them jailed pending trial.
