Turkish police on Tuesday said they captured 44 people suspected to be so-called “secret imams” linked to the Gülenist Terror Group (FETÖ) in raids in the capital Ankara and 27 other Turkish cities.
Ankara’s Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office and the Bureau of Counterterrorism charged a total of 46 suspects with serving as “secret imams” tasked by the terrorist group with infiltrating the police force, bringing in new recruits, sorting security officers by FETÖ’s coding system and tracking recruits by their loyalty to the organization.
During investigations, authorities found the suspects were still active in certain public institutions and launched synchronic raids in 28 cities, managing to capture 44 of them.
Also on Tuesday, the Ankara prosecutors ordered the detention of some 19 other suspects linked to a case of FETÖ fraud in a 2012 public exam for assistant tax inspectors.
FETÖ stole the questions for the exam and distributed them to its members, part of its long-running scheme to place its infiltrators in the bureaucracy, military and law enforcement.
The suspects, scattered across 19 provinces, are wanted for aiding and abetting the theft and distribution of said exam’s questions, prosecutors said.
Since December 2013, when the terrorist group emerged as the perpetrator of two coup attempts disguised as graft probes, FETÖ has been regarded as a security threat. Prosecutors say that the group's infiltrators in law enforcement, the judiciary, bureaucracy and the military had waged a long-running campaign to topple the government.
FETÖ has been under more intense scrutiny since the July 15, 2016 coup attempt its infiltrators in the army carried out, which left 251 people dead and thousands more injured. Under a state of emergency issued following the attempt, tens of thousands of people were detained, arrested or dismissed from public sector jobs.
The group faced more investigations following the coup attempt that killed 251 people and injured nearly 2,200 others. Tens of thousands of people were detained, arrested or dismissed from public sector jobs following the attempt under a state of emergency.
The terrorist group still has backers in army ranks and civil institutions but they managed to disguise their loyalty, as operations and investigations have indicated since the 2016 coup attempt.
Hundreds of investigations launched after the attempt sped up the collapse of the group’s far-reaching network in the country. Over the past few decades, the terrorist group is believed to have expanded its infiltration into the public sector, from law enforcement to ministries.
Last year, Türkiye’s National Intelligence Organization (MIT) found that over 3,000 infiltrators of FETÖ were still active within the Turkish National Police after spending more than six years to decipher an encrypted database seized from a top FETÖ member codenamed “Garson” ("Waiter") who was behind the group’s July 2016 coup.
The group is also implicated in a string of cases related to its alleged plots to imprison its critics, money laundering, fraud and forgery.
The terrorist group faces operations almost daily as investigators still try to uncover their massive network of infiltrators everywhere.
In 2023 alone, authorities caught 739 FETÖ suspects trying to flee to Europe through Türkiye’s northwestern borders, including expelled soldiers, judges, prosecutors, police officers and academics.
