Ahmet Güngör, a former police officer who was fired from his job after a coup attempt in Turkey in 2016, has gone missing after fleeing to Greece, the TR724 news website reported on Wednesday.
Güngör was one of the more than 125,000 civil servants who were expelled from public service under a state of emergency declared after the coup attempt on the pretext of an anti-coup fight.
According to TR724, his family, who hasn’t heard from him since he fled to Greece on Monday, are worried about him.
The family lost touch with Güngör as soon as he crossed the Evros River into Greece, TR724 said, adding that it had been determined that the former police officer wasn’t being kept at a police station in Greece and that he hadn’t been pushed back to Turkey.
Although the family contacted all the relevant institutions in Turkey and Greece, they haven’t been able to learn Güngör’s whereabouts, TR724 said.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) government launched a war against the Gülen movement, a worldwide civic initiative inspired by the ideas of Muslim cleric Fethullah Gülen, following corruption investigations in late 2013 that implicated then-prime minister and current President Erdoğan’s close circle.
The war against the movement accelerated after the attempted coup because Erdoğan and his AKP government accused the movement of masterminding the abortive putsch and initiated a widespread purge aimed at cleansing sympathizers of the movement from state institutions, dehumanizing its popular figures and putting them in custody.
A total of 319,587 people have been detained and 99,962 arrested in operations against supporters of the Gülen movement since the coup attempt, Turkey’s Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu said in a statement in December.
In addition to the thousands who were jailed, scores of other Gülen movement followers had to flee Turkey to avoid the government crackdown.