Turkish authorities have detained 53 people and arrested 40 of them in operations across 19 provinces, accused of links to the faith-based Gülen movement, Turkish Minute reported.
The operations were carried out in 19 provinces, including Ankara, Bursa, Diyarbakır, İstanbul and İzmir, within the past two weeks, Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya announced on Wednesday on X.
Of the 53 people detained, 40 have been arrested, while proceedings continue for the remainder, according to the minister.
The minister said the detainees were suspected of maintaining contact via payphones, providing financial support to organizations linked to the movement and sharing content on social media that authorities labeled as propaganda.
Yerlikaya said digital devices were also seized during the searches.
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 call all his contacts consecutively. 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 that 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.
Minister Yerlikaya said the authorities are “resolutely continuing their fight” against Gülen followers.
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 movement since 2016, with 11,085 still in prison. Legal proceedings are ongoing for over 24,000 individuals, while another 58,000 remain under active 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.
