Cafer Ongun, a former teacher serving a sentence over alleged links to the faith-based Gülen movement, died on September 21 after suffering a heart attack in Kütahya Prison, according to the TR724 news website.
Ongun, 51, reportedly had a heart attack in prison in May and was hospitalized. After undergoing cardiac surgery in İstanbul, he suffered a stroke in intensive care due to a blood clot, which left him paralyzed. He remained in intensive care for a month before passing away.
He had been dismissed from his job by a government decree amid a post-coup purge and was later sentenced to six years, three months on terrorism charges for membership in an association linked to the Gülen movement; using the ByLock messaging app; and having an account at the now-closed Bank Asya. He had served two years of his sentence. He is survived by a wife and two children.
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 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.
Since the coup attempt, 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, 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.
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.
