A total of 110 people have been detained over the past week in police operations that targeted alleged followers of the faith-based Gülen movement, Turkey’s Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya announced, Turkish Minute reported.
Yerlikaya said on X on Tuesday that 110 suspects have been detained in police operations across 23 provinces.
The detainees are accused of engaging in Gülen-linked activities at universities, in the military and in a new organization that is allegedly being formed despite a massive crackdown on the movement that has continued for over a decade and intensified in the aftermath of a failed coup in July 2016.
Over the last decade Turkish-Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen and his movement, which in the past had been praised by the Turkish government for their activities in education and inter-religious and intercultural dialogue, have faced various accusations from the government, including masterminding corruption investigations in 2013 and the coup attempt in 2016.
Gülen, who had been living in the United States since 1999, passed away at a hospital in Pennsylvania on October 20 at the age of 83.
The Turkish government labeled Gülen and his movement as “terrorists” in May 2016.
Gülen and his followers have strongly denied any involvement in the coup or any terrorist activity but have been the subject of a harsh crackdown for a decade, which intensified in the aftermath of the abortive putsch.
The other accusations against the suspects include staying in “secret” houses where alleged Gülen followers go into hiding in order to avoid arrest, contacting senior members of the movement via pay phone, being favored in state exams due to their proximity to the movement and using a mobile phone application known as ByLock.
The minister said the detainees also include some people who stood trial on Gülen-linked charges, were convicted and whose sentences were upheld by the appeals courts.
Police seized a sizable amount of Turkish lira and foreign currency during raids on the suspects homes in addition to a large number of documents and digital materials, according to Yerlikaya, who vowed to continue to continue the fight against Gülen followers.
Journalist Sevinç Özarslan said on X that the detainees include 13 former police officers who were fired due to their alleged Gülen links, two noncommissioned military officers and two academics as well as teachers, doctors, a retired police officer and military cadets.
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.
ByLock, once widely available online, has been considered a secret tool of communication among supporters of the movement since the coup attempt on July 15, 2016, despite the lack of any evidence that ByLock messages were related to the abortive putsch.
Although Gülen and his followers have strongly denied any involvement in the coup or terrorist activities, the government crackdown on the movement’s members continues today in Turkey and abroad, with detentions, arrests and deportations or extraditions of followers from foreign countries.
The latest detentions come despite a landmark ruling from the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights in September 2023 that found the use of ByLock not to constitute a criminal offense. The Grand Chamber ruled in the case of former teacher Yüksel Yalçınkaya that the use of the ByLock application was not an offense in itself and did not constitute sufficient evidence for an arrest.
Since the coup attempt, a total of 705,172 people have been investigated on terrorism or coup-related charges due to their alleged links to the movement. There are currently 13,251 people in prison who are in pretrial detention or convicted of terrorism in Gülen-linked trials.
