Three civilians and a police inspector were detained on Thursday in connection with the controversial escape of an eyewitness, authorities said.
The suspects are accused of facilitating Serdar Sertçelik’s escape. Detentions come one day after four police officers, including a deputy police chief of the capital Ankara, were detained over a case involving Sertçelik. Media reports say Sertçelik, an organized crime figure, was “persuaded” to act as a secret eyewitness by police officers for a plot against the government. They allegedly planned to employ his statements to launch a false graft probe against people close to the government.
Sertçelik was a member of an Ankara-based gang led by Ayhan Bora Kaplan who was arrested last year. While in detention, he was allegedly pushed to testify against a number of prominent figures, from former ministers and bureaucrats to lawmakers. Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya has decried the plot as something out of the playbook of the Gülenist Terror Group (FETÖ). FETÖ’s infiltrators in law enforcement and the judiciary have utilized “secret eyewitness” accounts in the past for investigations seeking to imprison the group’s critics. Sertçelik was earlier sentenced to house arrest and fitted with an electronic tracking device as part of the house arrest process. But it was later found out that he violated house arrest rules nine times. In his latest violation, he was shot in the leg in a restaurant. After his recovery, he fled abroad. After his escape, he released what he called phone recordings with police officers on social media, claiming he was pressured to act as a secret eyewitness in a plot against the government.
