Pro-government journalist and writer Fazıl Duygun has called on authorities to force people jailed over alleged links to the Gülen movement to commit suicide.
“FETÖ supporters should be forced in an appropriate way to commit suicide because these vile people do not seem to behave sensibly unless they die,” he tweeted on Monday.
Duygun’s Twitter account was suspended later in the day, but he has said he is going to continue tweeting via another handle.
The Turkish government blames the Gülen movement for a failed coup in 2016 and calls it FETÖ, short for the Fethullahist Terror Group.
The movement denies involvement in the coup and any terror activities.
More than 160,000 people have been taken into custody, of which 60,000 were put in pretrial detention over alleged Gülen links since the summer of 2016.
According to a 2017 report by Sweden-based monitoring group the Stockholm Center for Freedom (SCF), at least 53 people killed themselves both in and out of prison in what it calls suspicious deaths in the aftermath of the July 15, 2016 failed coup.
The relatives of most of them claim the detainees were not the kind of people to have committed suicide, casting doubt on the official narrative. Rumor has it that some of the detainees were killed after being subjected to torture under custody.
(Turkey Purge)