Turkish police detained 20 people, including 14 police officers, on Thursday in the fourth operation this week targeting individuals with alleged links to the faith-based Gülen movement, bringing the total number of detentions to 267 since Tuesday, the TR724 news website reported.
Police conducted raids on the homes of suspects under orders from the İzmir Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been targeting followers of the 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.
The detainees are accused of secretly communicating with their contacts within the movement via payphones.
The so-called “payphone investigations” are based on call records. The prosecutors assume that a member of the Gülen movement used the same 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 the other numbers called right before or after that call also belong to people with Gülen links.
Earlier this week nearly 247 people were detained, the majority of whom were from the military, in police operations across multiple provinces on the orders of the Istanbul and Izmir chief public prosecutors’ offices.
