Turkish authorities on Tuesday detained 22 people 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 İstanbul Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office, the suspects were detained in 11 provinces, including İstanbul, Ankara, Gaziantep, Kocaeli and Trabzon.
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 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 authorities accused the suspects of maintaining links to the movement based on the statements of secret witnesses, data allegedly obtained from an SD card provided by a government informant codenamed “Garson” (waiter), increased deposits in the now-shuttered Bank Asya and communicating with their contacts within the movement via payphones.
The credibility of Garson’s testimony has been severely undermined by previous findings suggesting that his signature on key documents may have been forged. Dr. Gökhan Güneş, a human rights lawyer, released documents demonstrating significant discrepancies in Garson’s signatures across different legal depositions conducted a week apart.
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.
Since the coup attempt in 2016, the Turkish government has accepted such activities as having an account at the now-shuttered Bank Asya, one of Turkey’s largest commercial banks at the time; using the ByLock, an encrypted messaging app that was available on Apple’s App Store and Google Play; and subscribing to the now-shut-down Zaman daily or other publications affiliated with members of the movement as benchmarks for identifying and arresting alleged followers of the Gülen movement on charges of membership in a terrorist organization.
