A 73-year-old Turkish man imprisoned over alleged links to the faith-based Gülen movement has been hospitalized with advanced gangrene and is expected to have his leg amputated, his daughter said in an October 20 post on X, renewing calls for the suspension of his prison sentence, the TR724 news website reported.
Abdullah Tırpan, who suffers from severe diabetes and circulatory problems, was transferred to a hospital from Metris Prison in İstanbul, where he had remained incarcerated despite repeated warnings about his deteriorating health.
His daughter, Esra Tırpan Yakut, announced on X that doctors had obtained the family’s consent for the amputation and appealed to Turkish authorities to suspend her father’s sentence so he could receive treatment outside prison.
“My father was hospitalized today. His leg will be amputated. The doctors obtained my family’s consent,” she wrote. “We are asking for the suspension of his sentence in the name of justice and humanity. Please help make our voices heard. Our entire family is devastated.”
It was not immediately clear when the operation would take place.
Independent lawmaker Mustafa Yeneroğlu, who visited Tırpan at Metris Prison earlier this month and warned that his condition could require amputation, reiterated his call on X for the suspension of the prisoner’s sentence.
Yeneroğlu said that when he visited Tırpan 12 days earlier, the gangrene in his left leg was already advanced, with severe discoloration and two large open wounds.
“As if a conviction for acts that were not crimes were not enough, why subject a person and a family to such suffering?” Yeneroğlu wrote on X. “This suffering must end, and the execution of his sentence must be suspended.”
Former European Parliament member Rebecca Harms also reacted on X, criticizing the treatment of seriously ill prisoners in Turkey and urging authorities to heed the family’s appeal.
“It is unbearable how seriously ill people are treated in Turkish prisons,” Harms wrote in German. “Listen to the family! No one deserves such inhumanity and cruelty.”
Harms also tagged the European Court of Human Rights in her post.
Yeneroğlu had warned on October 9 that Tırpan could die in custody without urgent medical intervention. He said the prisoner had been brought to the visiting room in a wheelchair, unable to stand or lift his leg, and was incapable of meeting his basic needs independently.
Tırpan suffers from multiple illnesses, including diabetes, thrombosis, venous insufficiency, hypertension and severe circulatory problems. He underwent surgery in July for wounds on his feet and has also experienced neurological problems that doctors said put him at risk of a stroke.
Despite his deteriorating condition, Turkey’s Council of Forensic Medicine, a state body that assesses prisoners’ fitness to remain incarcerated, concluded in December 2025 that Tırpan could remain in prison.
Medical boards at Tekirdağ City Hospital reached similar conclusions in May and June 2026, while another examination on October 6 reportedly found no medical obstacle to his continued imprisonment.
One medical report stated that Tırpan could manage his daily needs without assistance, a finding Yeneroğlu challenged after witnessing his physical condition.
Under Turkish law, a prison sentence may be suspended in certain cases when a prisoner is unable to manage life in prison because of a serious illness or disability and is not considered a serious danger to society.
Tırpan, a father of five who worked as a butcher for 55 years in the northwestern province of Tekirdağ, was sentenced to seven-and-a-half years in prison on August 8, 2019, for membership in an armed terrorist organization over his alleged involvement in the Gülen movement. Turkey’s Supreme Court of Appeals upheld his conviction on March 7, 2022.
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 evidence cited in his conviction included having shares in a company operating a private school allegedly affiliated with the movement, participating in religious discussion meetings, making charitable donations to the movement, subscribing to the now-closed Zaman newspaper and maintaining an account at Bank Asya, a bank formerly affiliated with the movement.
The court also cited his decision to send his children and grandchildren to schools associated with the movement and his possession of certain religious publications.
Since the coup attempt in 2016, the Turkish government has accepted such activities as having an account at now-shuttered Bank Asya, one of Turkey’s largest commercial banks at the time; using the ByLock messaging application, an encrypted messaging app that was available on Apple’s App Store and Google Play; and subscribing to the now-shut-down Zaman daily or other publications affiliated with members of the movement as benchmarks for identifying and arresting alleged followers of the Gülen movement on charges of membership in a terrorist organization.
Tırpan denied the criminal allegations. He was first arrested in August 2016 and spent approximately 19 months in pretrial detention before being released pending the outcome of his legal proceedings. He was imprisoned again in February 2025 following the finalization of his sentence.
