A Turkish court has jailed a neurosurgeon over alleged links to the faith-based Gülen movement after police detained him despite his request to perform scheduled surgeries, the TR724 news website reported.
The 33-year-old surgeon, identified only by the initials Ö.E., worked at a state hospital in western Turkey. He was detained at his home in the Nazilli district of Aydın province on October 14 and later sent to Nazilli Prison.
The early-morning raid took place in the presence of his wife and two young daughters. He asked police to allow him to perform the scheduled surgeries first, including one involving a patient with a spinal fracture, but they refused.
Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party (DEM Party) lawmaker and human rights defender Ömer Faruk Gergerlioğlu criticized the surgeon’s detention on X, sharing a message from his father and directing his criticism at the Justice Ministry and the Aydın Governor’s Office.
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 Erdoğan 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.
Authorities cited the surgeon’s participation in a charitable activity about 12 years earlier, when he was a medical student. He had traveled to Van province with fellow students to distribute meat to people in need during Eid al-Adha, and his name reportedly appeared in statements from other participants.
He was also accused of using ByLock, an encrypted messaging application once widely available on Apple’s App Store and Google Play, although TR724 reported that the application had never been used and that no message content had been found. Turkish authorities considered the application a secret communication tool used by members of the Gülen movement.
In 2023 the European Court of Human Rights ruled in a landmark case that convictions based on ByLock use and other alleged Gülen-linked activities, such as having an account at a movement-affiliated bank, violated the rights to a fair trial, no punishment without law and freedom of association.
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.
