The Ankara Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office has issued detention warrants for 101 police officers who took an examination in 2001 to become deputy police chiefs on the grounds that they were involved in exam fraud.
Fifty-six of the suspects have been detained so far.
The 56 were detained in simultaneous operations across 43 provinces, although it turned out that some of them had already been expelled or suspended from their jobs through government decrees due to their alleged links to the faith-based Gülen movement.
Turkey survived a military coup attempt on July 15 that killed over 240 people and wounded more than a thousand others. Immediately after the putsch, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government along with President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan pinned the blame on the Gülen movement.
Fethullah Gülen, who inspired the movement, strongly denied having any role in the failed coup and called for an international investigation into it, but President Erdoğan — calling the coup attempt “a gift from God” — and the government initiated a widespread purge aimed at cleansing sympathizers of the movement from within state institutions, dehumanizing its popular figures and putting them in custody.
According to a report by the state-run Anadolu news agency on May 28, 154,694 individuals have been detained and 50,136 have been jailed due to alleged Gülen links since the failed coup attempt.