Turkish police have detained 73 people across 16 provinces in the last four days over their alleged links to the faith-based Gülen movement, Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya announced on Monday.
Yerlikaya said the detainees included people who were involved in the movement’s alleged infiltration of the police through stealing questions for the personnel entrance exam and those who were identified as users of ByLock, a mobile messaging application, as well as due to evidence based on payphone records.
ByLock, once widely available online, has been considered a secret tool of communication among supporters of the Gülen movement since a coup attempt on July 15, 2016, despite the lack of any evidence that ByLock messages were related to the abortive putsch.
Turkish authorities continue to detain and prosecute people over ByLock use in defiance of a landmark European Court of Human Rights decision in late 2023 which concluded that the use of the app cannot be considered as evidence.
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.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been targeting followers of the Gülen movement 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 to target its members. He intensified the crackdown on the movement following the abortive putsch in 2016 that 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.
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.
Between June 2023 and June 2024, Turkish authorities carried out a total of 5,543 police operations and arrested 1,595 people linked to the movement.
