Turkey issues arrest warrant for 149 people for suspected links to Gulen
Turkey has ordered the arrest of 149 people, mostly from the security forces, over their suspected links to the US-based opposition cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom Ankara blames for an attempted coup in 2016.
The prosecutor’s office in the provinces of Balikesir, Gaziantep and Bursa ordered the apprehension of 74, 33 and 42 people, respectively, Turkey’s state-run Anadolu news agency, according to Reuters, reported on Monday.
All those who were ordered to be detained in the western province of Balikesir had previously been fired from the ranks of security forces, including six former police chiefs. In the southeastern province of Gaziantep, 24 people of those to be detained are security personnel on active duty, and in the western province of Bursa, six of those to be apprehended are six soldiers on active duty.
Turkey witnessed a coup attempt on July 15, 2016, when rogue soldiers moved to topple the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. A few hours later, however, the coup was suppressed. Some 250 people were killed and over 2,000 others wounded in the abortive putsch.
Since then, Ankara has been insisting that the US-based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen had purportedly masterminded and orchestrated the failed coup. Gulen has repeatedly denied the allegation.
However, the Turkish government has been engaged in suppressing perceived putschists and sympathizers in the wake of the coup. So far, about 80,000 people have been jailed pending trial and some 150,000 civil servants, military personnel, and others sacked or suspended from their jobs.
Turkey’s Western allies have criticized the scale of the crackdown. The Turkish government, however, claims that Gulen’s supporters have been allegedly running “a parallel state” within the civilian and military bureaucracy and pursuing their own agenda.
Gulen has been in a self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania since 1999. Ankara has several times tried to persuade Washington to extradite him, but all to no avail so far.
Separately on Monday, Turkish police detained two opposition journalists as part of an investigation into “political and military espionage,” the Anadolu said.
Ismail Dukel from Tele1 TV Ankara and Muyesser Yildiz, news coordinator at OdaTV online news site, were arrested and were being questioned by the anti-terror police in Ankara, Anadolu added, without giving details.
But other media reported that the arrests might be linked to reporting about Turkey's military intervention in Libya and Syria.
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