Türkan Alemdar, a 32-year-old Turkish mother of two, was jailed on April 7 along with her 19-month-old son to serve a seven-and-a-half-year sentence over alleged links to the faith-based Gülen movement, the TR724 news website reported on Friday.
Alemdar was sent to prison on April 7 in the central Turkish city of Eskişehir. She had been granted a deferral of her sentence last year due to her son’s young age, but the deferral expired when the child became 18 months old.
Her older son, aged 4 and a half, is reportedly living with his father in a rural village in the nearby Sakarya province.
At last count there are 759 children accompanying their mothers in Turkish prisons.
Alemdar was initially arrested in May 2018 and jailed for one year before being released pending trial.
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 December 2013 implicated then-prime minister Erdoğan 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 designated the movement as a terrorist organization and began to target its members. He intensified the crackdown on the movement following an abortive putsch in 2016 that he accused Gülen of masterminding. The movement strongly denies involvement in the coup attempt or any terrorist activity.
Prosecutors cited Alemdar’s alleged use of ByLock, once publicly available on Apple’s App Store and Google Play, attendance at a peaceful demonstration in 2014 outside the Eskişehir courthouse, social media activity, participation in religious study groups linked to the movement and residence in a student dormitory linked to the movement as grounds for her conviction.
Although the European Court of Human Rights has ruled in several cases that using the ByLock messaging app does not constitute a criminal offense, the Turkish government has treated the app as evidence to identify and arrest alleged followers of the Gülen movement on terrorism charges following the coup attempt.
Since the failed coup, 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.
In addition to the thousands who were jailed, scores of other Gülen movement followers had to flee Turkey to avoid the government crackdown.
