After being denied the opportunity to attend her father’s funeral on Monday, Sueda Güngör, who is currently in pretrial detention, was allowed by Turkish authorities to visit her family days later, for only one hour and in handcuffs, journalist Adem Yavuz Arslan reported on social media.
Sueda was not allowed to attend the funeral of her father, İbrahim Güngör, on September 8. On Wednesday she was taken to her family’s home, where she watched recordings of the funeral and mourned in handcuffs with relatives under the watch of gendarmes.
İbrahim Güngör, 72, died on September 7. He had been suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes and prostate problems and had been hospitalized several times in prison before his death. Despite his daughter’s months-long campaign for his release, Turkey’s Council of Forensic Medicine (ATK) had ruled in April that İbrahim Güngör was fit to remain in prison.
Sueda Güngör, a university student, was arrested on June 20 over alleged links to the faith-based Gülen movement, facing accusations similar to those that led to her father’s conviction.
Turkish 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 the 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.
According to the latest figures from the Justice Ministry, more than 126,000 people have been convicted for alleged links to the Gülen movement since 2016, with 11,085 still in prison. Legal proceedings are ongoing for over 24,000 individuals, while another 58,000 remain under investigation nearly a decade later. In addition to the thousands who were jailed, scores of other Gülen movement followers had to flee Turkey to avoid the government crackdown.
