Turkey’s Supreme Court of Appeals has overturned the prison sentences of Nurcan and Abdülkadir Arslan, parents of quintuplets and one other child, citing an incomplete investigation into evidence related to their conviction on links to the faith-based Gülen movement, the TR724 news website reported.
The appeals court ruled that the Hatay 2nd Penal Court’s investigation regarding the use of the ByLock messaging app was incomplete as the court had not conducted a sufficient investigation into whether the defendants had used the app.
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 President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been targeting followers of the Gülen movement, inspired by the late Muslim cleric Fethullah Gülen, since the corruption investigations of December 17-25, 2013, which implicated then-prime minister Erdoğan, his family members and his 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 that he accused Gülen of masterminding. The movement strongly denies involvement in the coup attempt or any terrorist activity.
In 2023 a landmark judgment delivered by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) said that the use of ByLock by itself cannot be interpreted as evidence of terrorism.
Despite the ECtHR ruling, Nurcan Arslan was sentenced to six years in prison and her husband Abdülkadir Arslan to nine years.
Following the couple’s arrest a video was circulated on social media showing their children crying for their parents in the courtroom. They have been under the care of relatives ever since.
Although their sentence has been overturned, the couple was denied release, and their case was returned to the Hatay 2nd Penal Court for a retrial. Ömer Faruk Gergerlioğlu, a deputy from the Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party (DEM Party), who has followed the family’s case from the beginning, expressed hope that the court would eventually decide to grant their release.
