A group of police officers have been waiting outside the private Hizmet Hospital in İstanbul’s Bahçelievler district in order to detain a woman who gave birth to her third child earlier in the day, AktifHaber.com reported on Friday.
While the details of the incident are still unknown, police raided the hospital to detain Yasemin Özkan, who gave birth to a baby by C-section on Friday.
Özkan is facing a detention warrant as part of an investigation into the Gülen movement, which the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) government and President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan accuse of masterminding a July 15, 2016 coup attempt.
This is not the first detention of a woman immediately after delivery.
In June, teacher Esra Demir was detained a day after giving birth in Batman as part of the witch-hunt targeting the Gülen movement.
In May, Aysun Aydemir, an English teacher who gave birth to a baby in a Cesarean procedure, was detained at the hospital for links to the Gülen movement and subsequently arrested by a court and put in pretrial detention with a three-day-old baby in Zonguldak province.
In late January, Fadime Günay, who had just given birth, was detained by police at Antalya’s Alanya Başkent Hospital as part of the same witch-hunt.
In early January, Ş.A., a former private school teacher and mother of a week-old premature infant, was taken into police custody over links to the movement while she was on her way to the hospital to feed the baby.
A day after Ş.A. was taken into police custody, another mother known as Meryem gave birth to twins by C-section at a hospital in Konya and was detained by police despite doctors’ reports that she should not travel and was taken to Aksaray from Konya in a police car.
According to recent data released by the Ministry of Justice, more than 2,250 mothers are held in penal institutions, of whom 520 are obliged to raise their 0 to 6-year-old children in prison.
A total of 138,148 people have been dismissed from their jobs, 118,235 detained and 55,927 arrested as part of a government crackdown following the failed coup last summer, a tally by TurkeyPurge.com said. (Parts of this story first appeared on TurkeyPurge.com)
