Turkish authorities have over the past week detained 23 people due to alleged links to the faith-based Gülen movement, Turkish media reported.
In the latest of these operations, police detained 11 on Friday in coordinated raids across nine provinces. They included eight former judges and prosecutors who had previously been fired due to alleged Gülen links. The accusations against the suspects include staying in “secret” houses where alleged Gülen followers prepared for exams to become a judge, joining trips organized by the movement, contacting senior members of the movement via pay phones and using the ByLock mobile phone application.
Additionally, on Tuesday police detained 12 more individuals across five provinces on similar charges. These detainees were accused of having accounts at the now-shuttered, Gülen-affiliated Bank Asya, previously working at institutions linked to the movement and maintaining contact with senior members.
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been targeting followers of the Gülen movement, inspired by the late Turkish cleric Fethullah Gülen, since corruption investigations revealed in December 2013 implicated then-prime minister Erdoğan as well as some members of his family and his inner circle.
Dismissing the investigations as a Gülenist coup and a 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 an abortive putsch that he accused Gülen of masterminding. The movement strongly denies involvement in the coup attempt or any terrorist activity.
Following the failed coup, the Turkish government carried out a massive purge of state institutions under the pretext of an anti-coup fight. More than 130,000 public servants, including in excess of 4,000 judges and prosecutors, as well as 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 so-called “payphone investigations” are based on call records. The prosecutors allege that a member of the Gülen movement used a single payphone to call all his contacts consecutively. Based on this, authorities assume that other numbers called before or after such a call also belong to individuals with Gülen links. However, officials do not have the content of the calls, and guilt is inferred solely based on the sequence of calls.
ByLock, once widely available online, has been considered a secret tool of communication among supporters of the movement since the coup attempt on July 15, 2016, despite the lack of any evidence that ByLock messages were related to the abortive putsch.
The latest detentions come despite a landmark ruling from the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights in September 2023 that found the use of ByLock not to constitute a criminal offense. The Grand Chamber ruled in the case of former teacher Yüksel Yalçınkaya that the use of the ByLock application was not an offense in itself and did not constitute sufficient evidence for an arrest.
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.