Fadime Günay, who gave birth to a baby boy late on Sunday, was detained by police on Monday, the T24 news website reported.
A group of police officers waited outside Antalya’s Alanya Başkent Hospital in order to detain Günay, whose husband was recently taken into custody over alleged links to the Gülen movement, said a tweet by former Turkish parliamentarian Feyzi İşbaşaran.
According to the T24 report, Günay was taken to police headquarters with her one-day-old baby. After her interrogation, she was sent to court with her baby, who was taken by relatives when Günay entered the courtroom. The court ordered Günay to spend one more day in the hospital.
In early January, Ş.A., a former private school teacher and mother of a week-old premature infant, was taken into police custody over links to the faith-based Gülen movement while she was on her way to the hospital to feed the baby.
As part of an investigation carried out by Aksaray Public Prosecutor Ayhan Demir, Ş.A. was detained by police and taken to Aksaray from Şanlıurfa province despite the fact that she produced hospital reports saying she should not travel as she gave birth a week earlier by C-section. She also told police officers that her baby was premature and needed to be fed breast milk and also requires special care in the intensive care unit.
A day after Ş.A. was taken into police custody, another mother known as Meryem gave birth to twins by C-section in a hospital in Konya and was detained by police despite hospital reports that she should not travel and was taken to Aksaray from Konya in a police car.
Despite Turkish Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen, whose views inspired the Gülen movement, and the movement having denied the Turkish government’s and President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s accusation of masterminding a coup attempt on July 15 that killed over 240 people and wounded more than a thousand others, Erdoğan — calling the coup attempt “a gift from God” — and the government launched a widespread purge aimed at cleansing sympathizers of the movement from within state institutions, dehumanizing its popular figures and putting them in custody.
Over 135,000 people have been purged from state bodies, in excess of 82,000 detained and more than 43,000 have been arrested since the coup attempt. Arrestees include teachers, journalists, judges, prosecutors, police and military officers, academics, governors and even a comedian. Critics argue that lists of Gülen sympathizers were drawn up prior to the coup attempt.