New footage made public Wednesday at a hearing on terrorist group FETÖ’s 2016 coup attempt sheds light on the attack on police by putschists and how they surrendered when the attempt was thwarted at Istanbul’s Atatürk Airport
Footage of the putsch attempt unfolding on July 15, 2016, laid bare the determination of putschists to seize power at all costs and how they were forced to surrender. The footage, part of an expert witness's report, was presented to Istanbul's 34th High Criminal Court Wednesday where soldiers accused of taking over Istanbul's Atatürk Airport are being tried.
The 159 defendants, including 76 remanded in custody, are on trial for incidents at the city's largest airport that led to the deaths of two people confronting the putschists. The coup attempt is blamed on military infiltrators of the Gülenist Terror Group (FETÖ) that tried to overthrow the government ahead of a planned purge of FETÖ infiltrators in the army in 2016.
The footage from security cameras at the airport was made public for the first time and shows putschists firing upon police officers trying to stop them and soldiers surrendering to the police who confronted them in the late hours of July 15, 2016. Nearly three hours of footage, which was released by Anadolu Agency (AA), was shown in a courtroom located across the street from the massive prison complex in Silivri that houses key figures of FETÖ's coup attempt.
One bit of footage shows a group of soldiers commanded by Barbaros Akça, a colonel who was a staff officer at the Air Forces School located near the airport, on the runway. Akça, accompanied by non-commissioned Sgt. Aslan Özkan, apparently orders soldiers to shut down the roads leading to the runway. The time shows 00:56 a.m. and soldiers are seen parking military vehicles on the roads and checking the premises. Three armored vehicles arrive later, and according to the investigation, one of the occupants in the vehicles was Col. Mustafa Kol, another high-ranking figure indicted in the coup attempt's Atatürk Airport leg. Atatürk Airport, along with the main bridge connecting Istanbul's Asian and European sides, was one of the strategic locations pro-coup soldiers managed to take over. Strong public resistance aided by anti-coup police officers helped to thwart the coup attempt. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who secretly flew from southwestern Turkey where he was on vacation to Istanbul, arrived at the airport after it was taken back from the putschists. Erdoğantarget="_blank"'>