The İstanbul Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office has issued detention warrants for 18 individuals including current and former police officers, as part of ongoing investigations targeting alleged members of the faith-based Gülen movement, the state-run TRT News reported.
Police carried out simultaneous raids in 14 provinces, including İstanbul, Ankara, Bursa, İzmir and Antalya, detaining 16 of the suspects. Prosecutors said the two others were found to be abroad.
Among those targeted are 14 police officers — 11 still in active service and three previously dismissed — as well as four alleged supervisors accused of overseeing police personnel within the movement’s structure.
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 the 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 statements of secret witnesses, alleged use of so-called “secret communication methods” and data purportedly obtained from an SD card provided by a government informant codenamed “Garson” (waiter).
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 concerns about the authenticity of the witness testimony are compounded by international and domestic legal opinions. The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) had previously ruled that secret witness testimony, commonly accepted in Turkish courts against political dissidents, cannot alone substantiate convictions.
Similarly, Turkey’s Constitutional Court ruled that the statement of an eyewitness could not be regarded as evidence of terrorism in the case of a former military officer imprisoned in late 2017 over alleged links to the Gülen movement.
Authorities also alleged that the suspects-maintained accounts at the now-closed Gülen-linked Bank Asya and were in contact with members of the movement’s “secret police structure” between 2012 and 2014, when they were studying at police academies.
According to the latest figures from the Justice Ministry, more than 126,000 people have been convicted for alleged links to the Gülen movement since 2016, with 11,085 still in prison. Legal proceedings are ongoing for over 24,000 individuals, while another 58,000 remain under investigation nearly a decade later.
In addition to the thousands who were jailed, scores of other Gülen movement followers had to flee Turkey to avoid the government crackdown.
