An İstanbul court released three former military cadets during the retrial of a case concerning the alleged occupation of Turkish state broadcaster TRT’s Ulus campus and the Digiturk building on the night of Turkey’s July 15, 2016 coup attempt.
The İstanbul 24th High Criminal Court ruled to keep the remaining defendants in detention and adjourned the hearings to December 1-3, according to Bold Medya.
The case concerns defendants accused in connection with actions at TRT and satellite television provider Digiturk during the coup attempt.
The court had issued its original verdict on January 19, 2018.
That ruling was upheld by a regional appeals court.
The 16th Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court of Appeals later upheld aggravated life and life sentences given to 20 defendants, including former Col. Hamdi Acar, former Maj. Ali Akkaş and former Capt. Fatih Aksoy, on charges of “attempting to overthrow the constitutional order.”
The chamber also upheld the acquittals of 35 defendants.
However, it overturned the convictions of 37 defendants who were military cadets at the time of the events.
The Supreme Court of Appeals ruled that their actions should be considered “aiding the violation of the Constitution,” a lesser charge than direct responsibility for attempting to overthrow the constitutional order.
The court also overturned the life sentence handed down to former noncommissioned officer Mehmet Rauf Çağmar.
The three cadets released today are among those being retried after the Supreme Court of Appeals’ reversal.
The case is part of the broader group of coup-attempt trials involving military cadets, many of whom have said they did not know a coup attempt was underway and acted under orders from superiors who told them there was a terrorist attack.
A total of 259 military cadets were detained on July 16, 2016, and arrested four days later; they were indicted a year later, and their trial concluded in May 2018, according to Turkish Minute and the Stockholm Center for Freedom.
The retrial keeps alive one of the central disputes in the post-coup cadet cases: whether young military students should be treated as direct participants in an attempt to overthrow the constitutional order or as lower-ranking personnel acting under command in circumstances they say they did not understand.
Ankara blames the coup attempt on the Gülen movement, a transnational civic initiative inspired by Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen, and designates the movement as a terrorist organization. The movement denies involvement in the coup attempt or any terrorist activity.
