Turkish authorities have detained 45 people over the past week for alleged links to the faith-based Gülen movement, Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya announced on Monday.
Yerlikaya said on X that suspects have been detained in police operations across 22 provinces, including Istanbul, Izmir, Trabzon and Bursa. At least 24 of the detainees have been arrested by a court.
The detainees were accused of engaging in activities linked to the Gülen movement, contacting members of the movement via pay phones, financing the movement and disseminating propaganda on social media.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been targeting followers of the Gülen movement, inspired by the late Muslim cleric Fethullah Gülen, since corruption investigations revealed in 2013 implicated then-prime minister Erdoğan as well as members of his family and his inner circle.
Dismissing the investigations as a Gülenist coup and conspiracy against his government, Erdoğan designated the movement as a terrorist organization and began pursuing its followers. He intensified the crackdown on the movement following an abortive putsch in 2016, which he accused Gülen of masterminding. Gülen and the movement strongly deny 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.
Since the coup attempt, at least 705,172 people have been investigated on terrorism or coup-related charges due to their alleged links to the movement. There are currently at least 13,251 people in prison as a result of pretrial detention or convictions related to terrorism in Gülen-linked trials.
