Turkish authorities have detained 93 people over the past week for alleged links to the faith-based Gülen movement, Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya announced on Tuesday.
Yerlikaya said on X that suspects have been detained in police operations across 29 provinces, including Ankara, Antalya, İstanbul and İzmir.
The detainees were accused of engaging in Gülen-linked activities at universities, in the military and other sectors, 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.
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.
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 did not 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 was insufficient evidence for an arrest.
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.
