A Turkish man whose daughter killed his wife and then herself after his post-coup imprisonment spoke publicly Sunday about how Turkey’s crackdown on the faith-based Gülen movement shattered his family, and now, he said, his only surviving child has been jailed.
Hakkı Alagöz, a former civil servant dismissed and imprisoned over alleged links to the Gülen movement during a post-2016-coup crackdown, spoke Sunday at an event organized by Vicdan Vakfı (Conscience Foundation), founded by Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party (DEM Party) MP Ömer Faruk Gergerlioğlu.
The livestream of the event, also posted to Gergerlioğlu’s YouTube channel, featured Alagöz’s emotional testimony about how his family was torn apart following his arrest.
“When they took me away, my daughter was 17,” he said in the broadcast. “By the time I came out, I had no daughter and no wife. And now, my son is in prison.”
Alagöz’s daughter, a student at Akdeniz University, struggled in his absence. She became addicted to drugs, and according to Alagöz, fell into depression.
In an incident that Alagöz says shattered what remained of the family, his daughter pushed her mother to her death during a psychological crisis. She then died by suicide.
Alagöz read excerpts from a letter his daughter once sent him in prison. “Everyone else hugs their father. I want to hug you, too. I want to lean on you and not worry about anything else,” she wrote. “You are my angel, Dad.”
Alagöz, once a civil servant, was detained 45 days after a coup attempt on July 15, 2016 during a night raid on his home in Antalya. His then-teenage daughter, wife and in-laws were present when police entered with firearms drawn, he recalled. His daughter reacted emotionally when officers tried to handcuff her father.
“She said, ‘My father is not a criminal. He’s a good man,’” Alagöz recounted. “That moment broke her.”
Alagöz was held for 16 months in pretrial detention in Alanya Prison before being released pending trial. In 2018 he was sentenced to more than eight years in prison, and was released on parole in 2023.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been targeting followers of the Gülen movement, inspired by the late Muslim cleric Fethullah Gülen, since corruption investigations revealed in 2013 implicated then-prime minister Erdoğan as well as some of his family members 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.
Following the failed coup, the Turkish government declared a state of emergency and carried out a massive purge of state institutions under the pretext of an anti-coup fight. Over 130,000 public servants, including 4,156 judges and prosecutors, and 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.
The family’s tragedy did not end there. Just weeks before the livestream, Alagöz’s son, a third-year student at Ankara University, was detained as part of a Gaziantep-based investigation into alleged links to the Gülen movement.
Alagöz says his son, like him, is innocent.
“They arrested him along with more than 200 [people],” he said. “Now he’s in Gaziantep Prison with 77 others. They’re students, not criminals.”
Gergerlioğlu, a prominent rights advocate, said Alagöz’s story is one of many.
“These are not just legal cases. These are lives broken by injustice,” he said during the broadcast. “We cannot remain silent.”
Now out of prison, Alagöz says the physical bars may be gone, but the trauma remains.
Alagöz says his only hope is that his son will be spared the fate that befell the rest of the family.
“I lost my daughter. I lost my wife. I cannot lose my son, too,” he said. “All we wanted was to live our lives. Now all we have are scars.”
