Turkish prosecutors issued detention warrants for 50 people in İstanbul in September 2017 after $1 bills were allegedly found in their safe deposit boxes at Bank Asya, a shuttered lender associated by Turkish authorities with the Gülen movement.
İstanbul Anatolian Chief Public Prosecutor İsmail Uçar ordered the detentions as part of post-coup investigations launched after Turkey’s July 15, 2016 coup attempt.
Police from the İstanbul Financial Crimes Unit raided addresses linked to the individuals named in the warrants.
Those detained were taken to police stations for questioning, while officers also searched their homes and other addresses.
The operation reflected one of the more disputed evidentiary practices used in Turkey’s post-coup crackdown: treating possession of $1 bills as alleged evidence of links to the Gülen movement.
Turkish authorities claimed in some investigations that specific $1 bills were used as symbols or coded identifiers among alleged Gülen-linked networks.
Critics said such claims were arbitrary and turned ordinary personal possessions into criminal suspicion without individualized evidence of wrongdoing.
Bank Asya, once one of Turkey’s largest participation banks, was seized by state authorities before the coup attempt and later shut down by government decree.
After July 15, prosecutors treated accounts, deposits or safe deposit boxes at Bank Asya as indicators in investigations targeting alleged Gülen movement links.
The Gülen movement is a transnational civic initiative inspired by Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen.
Ankara blames the coup attempt on the movement and designates it as a terrorist organization. The movement denies involvement in the coup or any terrorist activity.
