Turkish police on Tuesday said they captured 18 suspects, including so-called “secret imams,” linked to the Gülenist Terror Group (FETÖ) in raids in Istanbul and three other cities.
Istanbul's Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office and the Organized Crime Bureau charged the suspects with serving as a “secret imam of the police force,” “private imam,” “high school supervisor” and “major regional accountant” as part of an ongoing investigation into the terrorist group.
Phone records of the suspects showed they maintained contact with FETÖ’s high-profile members until 2016 when the group mounted its defeated coup d’etat.
The Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office in the capital of Ankara has also ordered the detention of some 11 other suspects linked to FETÖ’s infiltration of the Gülhane Training and Research Hospital (GATA), formerly known as the Gülhane Military Medical Academy.
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.
The group is also implicated in a string of cases related to its alleged plots to imprison its critics, money laundering, fraud and forgery.
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 terrorist group faces operations almost daily as investigators still try to uncover their massive network of infiltrators everywhere – from military and police to judiciary and bureaucracy.
