Turkish police have detained 34 people across 19 provinces over their alleged links to the Gülen movement, a faith-based group targeted by the government, Turkish Minute reported, citing Turkey’s interior minister Ali Yerlikaya’s announcement on X on Thursday.
The detentions were carried out as part of raids conducted in the provinces of Adana, Amasya, Ankara, Antalya, Aksaray, Bursa, Edirne, Erzurum, Eskişehir, Gaziantep, Hatay, İstanbul, İzmir, Kayseri, Kahramanmaraş, Kırşehir, Muğla, Tokat and Trabzon.
Yerlikaya said the detainees included suspects who were involved in the movement’s alleged infiltration of the military as well as people who were determined to have used the ByLock messaging application or were accused of having secretly communicated with their contacts within the movement via pay phones. Also detained were individuals whose convictions due to Gülen links were upheld by the Supreme Court of Appeals and were at large.
ByLock, once widely available online, has been considered a secret tool of communication among supporters of the Gülen movement, a faith-based group outlawed by Ankara since a coup attempt on July 15, 2016, despite the lack of any evidence that ByLock messages were related to the abortive putsch.
The detentions came despite a landmark European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) judgment delivered last year which made clear that the use of the ByLock messaging app does not constitute a criminal offense.
The so-called “pay phone investigations” are based on call records. The prosecutors assume that a member of the Gülen movement used the same pay phone 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.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been targeting followers of the Gülen movement, inspired by Muslim cleric Fethullah Gülen, since the corruption investigations of 2013, which implicated then-prime minister Erdoğan, his family members and his inner circle.
Dismissing the investigations as a Gülenist coup and conspiracy against his government, Erdoğan designated the movement as a terrorist organization and began targeting its members. He intensified the crackdown on the movement following an abortive putsch in 2016, which he accused Gülen of masterminding. Gülen and the movement strongly deny involvement in the coup attempt or any terrorist activity.
In addition to the thousands who were jailed, scores of other Gülen movement followers had to flee Turkey to avoid the government crackdown.
Turkish authorities routinely rely on witness statements as evidence to identify and prosecute members of the group.
The defendants in the trials against the movement are often encouraged to benefit from the country’s repentance laws allowing for reduced penalties in exchange for denouncing other members of the group.
In recent years, there have also been many reports about the alleged use of torture and ill-treatment in custody to coerce detainees into becoming informants and incriminating others.
