Turkish authorities on Wednesday ordered the detention of 19 individuals across eight provinces in an ongoing crackdown on 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, the police carried out operations to detain six civil servants and 13 former public officials who had been dismissed by decrees issued during a state of emergency that was declared after a coup attempt in 2016.
Prosecutors accuse the suspects of membership in a terrorist organization, citing the alleged use of payphones to communicate with Gülen-linked contacts and the statements of witnesses.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been targeting followers of the Gülen movement, inspired by the late Muslim cleric Fethullah Gülen, since corruption investigations in December 2013 implicated him as well as some members of his family 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 the 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 allege that a member of the Gülen movement used a single payphone to consecutively call all his contacts. 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 the primary 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.
According to the latest figures from the Justice Ministry, more than 126,000 people have been convicted for alleged links to the movement since 2016, with 11,085 still in prison. Legal proceedings are ongoing for over 24,000 individuals, while another 58,000 remain under active investigation nearly a decade later.
In addition to the thousands who were jailed, scores of other Gülen movement followers had to flee Turkey to avoid the government crackdown.
