Kamil Dayan, 37, a former prison guard dismissed by emergency decree and convicted over alleged links to the faith-based Gülen movement, died Tuesday from injuries sustained in a traffic accident, the TR724 news website reported.
Dayan had been hospitalized in the central province of Niğde for two weeks with injuries sustained in the crash. His wife and child, who were also in the vehicle, suffered minor injuries.
Dayan had worked as a prison guard at Ankara’s Sincan Prison before he was dismissed by an emergency decree following a coup attempt on July 15, 2016.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has targeted the Gülen movement, a worldwide civic initiative inspired by the ideas of 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 a terrorist organization in May 2016, intensifying a sweeping crackdown after the 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.
Dayan was detained after his dismissal and spent nine months in pretrial detention. He was later sentenced to more than six years in prison on charges of membership in a terrorist organization and released pending appeal.
His conviction was based on his alleged use of ByLock, an encrypted messaging app once widely available on Apple’s App Store and Google Play that Turkish authorities claim was used as a secret communication tool for Gülen supporters.
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 violated the rights to a fair trial, no punishment without law and freedom of association.
His appeal was pending before the Supreme Court of Appeals at the time of his death.
Following the coup attempt, the Turkish government declared a state of emergency that remained in effect until July 19, 2018. During this period, the government carried out a purge of state institutions under the pretext of an anti-coup fight by issuing a number of government decrees. More than 113,000 civil servants and 4,362 judges and prosecutors were dismissed over alleged links to terrorist organizations, while more than 26,000 members of the armed forces were expelled from the military for alleged membership in or relationships with “terrorist organizations” by emergency decree-laws subject to neither judicial nor parliamentary scrutiny.
