Turkish authorities detain 71 people over alleged Gülen links: minister

Turkish authorities detained 71 people over the past week for alleged links to the faith-based Gülen movement, Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya announced on Friday.

Yerlikaya said on X that suspects have been detained in police operations across 23 provinces, including İstanbul and İzmir.

The detainees are accused of spreading propaganda for the movement on social media, contacting members of the movement via pay phones and using the encrypted messaging app ByLock, which was available on Apple’s App Store and Google Play.

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.

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.

Take a second to support Stockholm Center for Freedom on Patreon!
Become a patron at Patreon!