Fatih Gürsul, a former adviser to Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, the chairman of the main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP), was sentenced by an Istanbul court Tuesday to 10 years in prison for his links to the Gülenist Terror Group (FETÖ).
Gürsul was among 11 defendants tried for links to the terrorist group blamed for the 2016 coup attempt that killed 249 people. He was detained in December 2016 as part of a probe into Gülenist infiltration at Istanbul University, where he worked as an academic. Prosecutors had charged him with membership in a terrorist group and accused him of using ByLock, an encrypted messaging app used by members of FETÖ.
The defendant rejected the charges in Tuesday's hearing and claimed he never communicated with FETÖ members, as prosecutors claimed.
A report in Sabah newspaper on Gürsul's correspondence with a senior FETÖ elder shows he sought advice from the group for everything he did and shared his emails to Kılıçdaroğlu with FETÖ members. The messages between 2014 and 2015 indicate that Gürsul was "ready to obey any orders" from A.H.P., a point man for FETÖ leader Fetullah Gülen. Like Gülen, A.H.P. lives in the United States.
Investigators say they detected at least 256 messages sent by Gürsul, which indicate that he sought advice from FETÖ on what to do in his post as a CHP adviser before a critical election. In one message, he requests a date to visit Gülen in the United States. In another message, he said he would help Kılıçdaroğlu more ahead of an early election.
A message sent by Gürsul while he was apparently abroad, says Kılıçdaroğlu sent him an email. In the email, Kılıçdaroğlu tells Gürsul he is "sad about what's happening in Turkey." "Undoubtedly, you are concerned about what is going on," Kılıçdaroğlu says in his email, according to Gürsul's intercepted ByLock message.
Testimony from Gülenists in the bureaucracy who were detained after the July 15 coup attempt, pointed to the prevalence of the app's use. Prosecutors say ByLock was popular among Gülenists for secret communications between 2013 and 2015, and after 2015, the terrorist group turned to Eagle IM, which offered "256-bit end-to-end AES encryption."