The Ankara Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office issued detention warrants for 51 people, including 48 military personnel, as part of an investigation targeting alleged Gülen movement links in Turkey’s Land Forces Command.
The prosecutor’s office said 43 of the military personnel were still on active duty.
The operation was carried out by the Ankara Police Department’s counterterrorism units.
The 51 people targeted included 48 soldiers and three public employees, according to Turkish media reports. Some pro-government outlets described the three civilians as “civilian imams,” Ankara’s term for alleged nonmilitary handlers accused of coordinating Gülen movement members inside state institutions.
The investigation was part of the post-coup crackdown launched after Turkey’s July 15, 2016 coup attempt.
Ankara designates the Gülen movement, a transnational civic initiative inspired by Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen, as a terrorist organization and blames it for Turkey’s 2016 coup attempt. The movement denies involvement in the coup or any terrorist activity.
The Turkish government has pursued thousands of soldiers, civil servants, judges, teachers, police officers and private-sector employees over alleged links to the movement since the coup attempt.
The warrants came amid a wave of military investigations based on alleged payphone or fixed-line contacts, a method prosecutors used to infer links to the Gülen movement from call-record patterns. Rights lawyers have criticized the practice, saying authorities often did not have the content of the calls and relied on assumptions about who was contacted through public phones.
The November 2018 warrants showed that investigations into alleged Gülen movement networks in the Turkish Armed Forces were still continuing more than two years after the failed coup.
