Turkish authorities detained 73 people and arrested 48 of them in operations across 27 provinces, accused of links to the faith-based Gülen movement, Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya said on Friday.
Over the last decade Turkish-Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen and his movement, which in the past had been praised by the Turkish government for their activities in education and inter-religious and intercultural dialogue, have faced various accusations from the government, including masterminding corruption investigations in 2013 and a coup attempt in 2016.
Gülen, who had been living in the United States since 1999, passed away at a hospital in Pennsylvania on October 20 at the age of 83.
The Turkish government labeled Gülen and his movement as “terrorists” in May 2016.
Gülen and his followers have strongly denied any involvement in the coup or any terrorist activity but have been the subject of a harsh crackdown for a decade.
The operations were carried out between March 19 and March 27, with many of the detentions taking place during sahur, the pre-dawn meal observed during Ramadan. Yerlikaya announced the results of the operations in a statement shared on X on Friday.
The minister said the detainees were suspected of maintaining contact via payphones, using the encrypted messaging app ByLock and sharing content on social media that authorities labeled as propaganda. Some individuals were also accused of being part of the movement’s alleged “military and current structures” or of providing financial support.
Yerlikaya said digital devices and documents were seized during the searches.
Of the 73 people detained, 48 have been formally arrested, 16 were released under judicial supervision and proceedings continue for the remainder.
The so-called “payphone investigations” are based on call records. The prosecutors allege that a member of the Gülen movement used a single 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 other numbers called right before or after that call also belong to people with Gülen links. The authorities do not possess the content of the calls in question. The supposition of guilt is solely based on the order of the calls made from the phone.
ByLock, once widely available online, has been considered a secret tool of communication among supporters of the movement since the coup attempt on July 15, 2016, despite the lack of any evidence that ByLock messages were related to the abortive putsch.
The latest detentions come despite a landmark ruling from the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights in September 2023 that found the use of ByLock not to constitute a criminal offense. The Grand Chamber ruled in the case of former teacher Yüksel Yalçınkaya that the use of the ByLock application was not an offense in itself and did not constitute sufficient evidence for an arrest.
Minister Yerlikaya vowed to continue the fight against Gülen followers.
Although Gülen and his followers have strongly denied any involvement in the coup or terrorist activities, the government crackdown on the movement’s members continues today in Turkey and abroad, with detentions, arrests and deportations or extraditions of followers from foreign countries.
Since the coup attempt, a total of 705,172 people have been investigated on terrorism or coup-related charges due to their alleged links to the movement. There are currently 13,251 people in prison who are in pretrial detention or convicted of terrorism in Gülen-linked trials.