Turkish Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya announced on Friday that Turkish courts have arrested 67 people out of 178 who were detained in nationwide operations over the past two weeks as part of an intensified crackdown on the faith-based Gülen movement, Turkish Minute reported.
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.
The detentions took place in raids across 45 provinces, including major cities such as İstanbul, Ankara and İzmir.
According to Yerlikaya’s statement on X, those apprehended were accused of involvement in the movement’s “current structure,” contacting movement members via pay phones and having used ByLock, an encrypted messaging application that was widely available on Apple’s App Store and Google Play.
Turkish authorities have considered ByLock to be a secret tool of communication among supporters of the Gülen movement since a coup attempt on July 15, 2016, despite a lack of evidence that ByLock messages were related to the abortive putsch. Although the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has in many cases made clear that use of the ByLock messaging app does not constitute a criminal offense, detentions and arrests of individuals continue in Turkey for their alleged use of the ByLock application.
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.
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.
