Turkish prosecutors have issued detention warrants for four current and six former staff members of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs over alleged links to the faith-based Gülen movement, the state-run Anadolu news agency reported.
As part of an investigation launched by the Ankara Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office, detention warrants were issued on Friday, with Turkish police conducting operations in six provinces across Turkey.
The suspects are accused of secretly communicating with their contacts within the movement via payphones.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been targeting followers of the Gülen movement, inspired by the late Turkish Muslim cleric Fethullah Gülen, since the corruption investigations of December 17-25, 2013, which implicated then-prime minister Erdoğan, 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 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.
Following the failed coup, the Turkish government declared a state of emergency and carried out a massive purge of state institutions under the pretext of an anti-coup fight. Over 130,000 public servants, including 4,156 judges and prosecutors, and more than 24,000 members of the armed forces were summarily removed from their jobs for alleged membership in or relationships with “terrorist organizations” by emergency decree-laws subject to neither judicial nor parliamentary scrutiny.
The detentions come amid a yearslong purge of employees of the foreign ministry, one of several state institutions targeted in the government’s crackdown since the coup attempt.
In September eight staff members of the ministry and six former employees were detained over alleged links to the movement. Concerns intensified in May 2019 after authorities detained around 100 former diplomats on allegations that they cheated on entrance exams. Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) lawmaker and rights defender Ömer Faruk Gergerlioğlu later alleged that some of those detained were tortured, including accounts of rape with batons. The Ankara Bar Association investigated and reported that victims’ testimonies “confirm that the individuals were subjected to blows, torture and ill-treatment” and that some said they were forced to sign prepared statements. Despite those findings, prosecutors in 2020 declined to pursue charges.
