Turkish police on Tuesday detained 25 people in coordinated raids across eight provinces over alleged links to the faith-based Gülen movement, the Stockholm Center for Freedom reported.
Among the detainees were 19 former civil servants who were working for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs before being dismissed by a government decree after a failed coup on July 15, 2016.
Police conducted raids on the homes of the suspects under orders from the Ankara Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been targeting followers of the movement, inspired by the late Muslim cleric Fethullah Gülen, since corruption investigations revealed in 2013 implicated then-prime minister Erdoğan as well as some of his family members and inner circle.
Dismissing the investigations as a Gülenist coup and a conspiracy against his government, Erdoğan began to target the movement’s members. He designated the movement as a terrorist organization in May 2016 and intensified the crackdown on it following an abortive putsch in July of the same year that he accused Gülen of masterminding. The movement strongly denies involvement in the coup attempt or any terrorist activity.
The detainees are accused of secretly communicating with their contacts within the movement via payphones.
The so-called “payphone investigations” are based on call records. The prosecutors assume that a member of the Gülen movement used the same payphone to call all his contacts consecutively. Based on that assumption, when an alleged member of the movement is found in call records, it is assumed that the other numbers called right before or after that call also belong to people with Gülen links.
They are also accused of using the ByLock messaging app during the time they worked for the ministry.
ByLock, once widely available online, has been considered a secret tool of communication among supporters of the movement since the coup attempt, despite the lack of any evidence that ByLock messages were related to the abortive putsch.
According to a statement from Justice Minister Yılmaz Tunç ahead of the eighth anniversary of the coup attempt last July, a total of 705,172 people have been investigated since the failed coup on terrorism or coup-related charges due to their alleged links to the movement. Tunç said at the time that there were 13,251 people in prison in pretrial detention or convicted of terrorism in Gülen-linked trials.
These figures are thought to have increased since then since the operations targeting Gülen followers continue unabated. Erdoğan and several government ministers said on many occasions that there would be no “slackening” in the fight against the movement following the cleric’s death at the age of 83.
Rights groups and international observers have repeatedly criticized the breadth of the crackdown, which has resulted in the dismissal of some 130,000 civil servants.