DM Monitoring
ISTANBUL: Turkish police on Tuesday arrested 158 members of the military suspected of links to Fe-thullah Gulen, who was accused of masterminding a failed 2016 coup, the public prosecutor´s office in Istanbul said.
Gulen, a cleric who died in 2024, was once a close ally of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan before the two became bitter enemies.
He relocated to the United States in 1999 and never returned.
The government accuses Gulen’s Hizmet movement of seeking to establish a “parallel state”.
Around 50 other members of the military were arrested in late May.
The prosecutor’s office said that a search was still underway for another 18 members of the military. It said that the arrests mainly concerned the army.
Authorities have detained close to 26,000 people accused of belonging to the Hizmet movement since the 2016 failed coup.
More than 9,000 of them have been jailed, according to Turkish justice authorities.
Earlier, Prosecutors in Turkey issued arrest warrants for 63 active-duty military personnel Friday over links to a group accused of attempting a coup in 2016.
Istanbul Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office said the suspects included four colonels and came from the army, navy, air force and gendarmerie. Early morning raids across the country resulted in 56 suspects being detained.
They are allegedly tied to an outlawed group that Turkey refers to as the Fethullahist Terror Organisa-tion, or FETO. Its leader, Fethullah Gulen, died in October last year in the United States, where he had lived since 1999 in self-imposed exile.
Some 290 people were killed in July 2016 when rogue military units took to the streets of Ankara and Istanbul in a bid to depose the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Jet fighters bombed the parliament building and presidential palace while Erdogan narrowly escaped assassination or cap-ture while vacationing on the west coast.
A subsequent purge of the military, police, judiciary and other state agencies saw tens of thousands arrested. Schools, businesses and media organisations tied to Gulen were closed down.
The prosecutor’s statement said those targeted Friday were identified through telephone communi-cations and said that FETO still posed the “greatest threat to the constitutional order and survival of the state.” Since the failed coup, 25,801 military suspects have been detained, it added.
The statement did not specify the exact charges against the suspects.
Gulen, a former cleric, amassed a worldwide following over the decades and aided Erdogan’s rise to power in 2003.
The alliance broke down after the government closed some Gulen-run educational establishments, and Gulenists in the police and judiciary pursued corruption allegations against Erdogan’s government. Gulen always denied any involvement in the failed coup. He was wanted in Turkey, which repeatedly demanded his extradition from the US.
The coup attempt contributed to the acceleration of authoritarian tendencies in Turkey, with Er-dogan’s government implementing measures that consolidated his powers.
