A 72-year-old Turkish inmate serving a prison sentence for alleged links to the faith-based Gülen movement has lost his ability to speak, two months after authorities rejected his request to suspend his sentence on grounds of health, the TR724 news website reported.
Abdullah Tırpan lost his speaking ability on February 12 and was examined at the prison infirmary. He was returned to his ward, awaiting transfer to a hospital’s neurology unit.
His daughter, Refia Tırpan, said her father could barely speak during a visit on February 3 and appeared visibly weakened. He had lost significant weight due to stomach problems that prevented him from eating properly, she said.
Tırpan suffers from a range of serious conditions including diabetes, pneumonia and neuropathy. Since starting to serve his sentence in February 2025, he has developed heart problems and been placed on medication. According to his family, he has been sent to the prison infirmary 40 times and fainted on multiple occasions.
Turkey’s Council of Forensic Medicine (ATK) ruled on December 17, 2025, that Tırpan was fit to remain in prison, rejecting a request to suspend his sentence on health grounds.
The ATK frequently comes under criticism over its questionable reports that find ailing inmates fit to remain in prison. Rights advocates slam the agency over its lack of independence from political influence and its role in compounding the persecution of political prisoners.
Tırpan was first detained on August 16, 2016, during a crackdown that followed a failed coup a month earlier and spent some 19 months in pretrial detention before being sentenced by the Tekirdağ 3rd High Criminal Court. He was re-arrested on February 25, 2025, after Turkey’s Supreme Court of Appeals upheld his seven-and-a-half-year sentence.
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been targeting followers of the Gülen movement, inspired by the late Muslim cleric Fethullah Gülen, since corruption investigations in December 2013 implicated him as well as some members of his family and inner circle.
Dismissing the investigations as a Gülenist coup and a conspiracy against his government, Erdoğan began to target the movement’s members. He designated the movement as a terrorist organization in May 2016 and intensified the crackdown on it following an abortive putsch in July of the same year that he accused Gülen of masterminding. The movement strongly denies involvement in the coup attempt or any terrorist activity.
The court convicted Tırpan on charges that cited membership in a foundation associated with the movement, his deposits at Bank Asya, subscriptions to movement-affiliated publications, donations to related charities and sending his children to schools later closed for alleged Gülen links.
In a 2018 statement to the court, Tırpan denied involvement in illegal activity, saying he ran a family business with multiple retail locations and an industrial kitchen. “I have no criminal record,” he told the court, adding that his accounts and donations were personal and not part of any organizational activity.
Since the coup attempt in 2016, the Turkish government has accepted such activities as having an account at the 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.
Under Turkey’s Law on the Execution of Sentences and Security Measures, courts may suspend the sentence of a prisoner who, due to a serious illness or disability, cannot sustain life in prison conditions and who is not considered a serious or concrete danger to society. Rights groups say the provision is very rarely applied in practice.
