According to the announcement made by Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya on Thursday, Turkish police have detained 72 individuals in 17 provinces for their alleged ties to the Gülen movement, which is based on religious principles.
Yerlikaya reported that the detainees included individuals suspected of infiltrating the police and judiciary on behalf of the movement, as well as those accused of secretly communicating with their contacts within the movement using pay phones.
The so-called “pay phone investigations” are based on call records. Prosecutors assume that a member of the Gülen movement used the same pay phone to call all their contacts consecutively. Based on this assumption, when an alleged member of the movement is found in call records, it is assumed that other numbers called right before or after that call also belong to people with Gülen links.
Also detained were individuals who were denounced as members of the movement in the testimony of others, or those who were at large with sentences over Gülen links upheld by the Supreme Court of Appeals.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been targeting followers of the Gülen movement since the corruption investigations of December 2013, which implicated then-Prime Minister Erdoğan, his family members, and his inner circle.
Dismissing the investigations as a Gülenist coup and conspiracy against his government, Erdoğan designated the movement as a terrorist organization and began to target its members. He intensified the crackdown on the movement following a failed coup attempt in 2016, which he accused Gülen of masterminding. Gülen and the movement strongly deny involvement in the coup attempt or any terrorist activity.
In addition to the thousands of people who were jailed, scores of other followers of the Gülen movement had to flee Turkey to avoid the government crackdown.
Turkish authorities routinely rely on witness statements as evidence to identify and prosecute members of the group.
The defendants in the trials against the movement are often encouraged to benefit from the country’s repentance laws, allowing for reduced penalties in exchange for denouncing other members of the group. In recent years, there have also been many reports about the alleged use of torture and ill-treatment in custody to coerce detainees into becoming informants and incriminating others.
