A former Turkish military officer who was dismissed after a 2016 coup attempt and later tried and convicted was critically injured in a workplace accident on Tuesday in southeastern Turkey, the TR724 news website reported.
Recep Karaşal, a former lieutenant and mechanical engineering graduate, was injured while working on a railway lighting project in Karkamış, a district in the southeastern province of Gaziantep near the Syrian border.
Karaşal was helping install light poles along the Gaziantep-Karkamış railway when a metal pole weighing about 300 kilograms (660 pounds) on which he was working fell to the ground, taking Karaşal with it.
A metal fragment pierced his esophagus, punctured his left lung and injured his heart. He also suffered 12 broken ribs.
He was taken to Gaziantep City Hospital, where he underwent emergency surgery late Tuesday. His wife, Hacer Karaşal, said the operation could take several hours. His family said his condition was critical.
Karaşal had served as a contract officer in Turkey’s gendarmerie, a military force responsible for security in rural areas. He was dismissed from the gendarmerie on October 16, 2018, during sweeping purges that followed the failed coup.
He was later sentenced to more than six years in prison over alleged links to the faith-based Gülen movement based on payphone calls.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has targeted 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. He dismissed the probes as a Gülenist conspiracy and later 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.
The so-called “payphone investigations” are based on call records. The prosecutors allege that a member of the Gülen movement used a single payphone to consecutively call all his contacts. Based on that assumption, when an alleged member of the movement is found in call records, it is assumed that other numbers called right before or after the primary call also belong to people with Gülen links. The authorities do not possess the content of the calls in question. The supposition of guilt is solely based on the order of the calls made from the phone.
Following the coup attempt, the Turkish government declared a state of emergency (OHAL) 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, known as KHKs. Over 130,000 public servants, including 4,156 judges and prosecutors, as well as more than 24,000 members of the armed forces were summarily removed from their jobs for alleged membership in or relationships with “terrorist organizations” by emergency decree-laws subject to neither judicial nor parliamentary scrutiny.
Former public servants were not only fired from their jobs but also banned from working again in the public sector and getting a passport to seek employment abroad. The government also made it difficult for them to work formally in the private sector. Notes were put on the social security database about dismissed public servants to deter potential employers.
As a result, many purge victims have had to work in uninsured jobs with very little workplace safety. There have also been several cases where former public servants have died due to occupational accidents in physically demanding jobs.
In recent years, some of the people who were fired have been reinstated, yet this process has often come too late. Numerous cases have surfaced where dismissed individuals, facing severe emotional and financial strain, have died by suicide or otherwise passed away before their reinstatement.
