Authorities have detained 34 people suspected to be infiltrators from the Gülenist Terror Group (FETÖ) in countywide raids, Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya announced Thursday.
Intelligence officers and provincial police departments captured the suspects in an operation code-named “Clamp-26” conducted across 19 cities, including Istanbul and Ankara, as well as southern Antalya, Kahramanmaraş, northeastern Trabzon and Erzurum, Yerlikaya said on X.
The suspects are charged with operating in the terrorist group’s so-called “secret formations” in the Turkish military and police force, Yerlikaya said.
Authorities found the suspects communicated with FETÖ handlers via payphones, that they were users of the organization’s crypto communication program ByLock, that their names were mentioned in the statements and identifications of previously detained suspects and that they had a finalized prison sentence or a search warrant for their arrest.
Security forces also seized large amounts of digital materials during the raids.
Yerlikaya congratulated the police force for carrying out the operation and assured operations against terrorist organizations and their collaborators will continue “with determination.”
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.
Before that, the terrorist group was the perpetrator of two other coup attempts disguised as graft probes and was marked a security threat first in December 2013.
Following the attempt, a state of emergency was declared and tens of thousands of people were detained, arrested or dismissed from public-sector jobs.
FETÖ still has backers in army ranks and civil institutions, but they managed to disguise their loyalty, as operations and investigations since the coup attempt have indicated.
The terrorist group faces operations almost daily as investigators still try to unravel their massive network of infiltrators everywhere. In 2024 alone, police apprehended hundreds of FETÖ suspects across the country, including fugitives on western borders trying to flee to Europe.
Many of the group's members had already left the country before the coup attempt after Turkish prosecutors launched investigations into other crimes of the terrorist group.
These fugitives, featuring expelled soldiers, judges, prosecutors, police officers and academics, often try to blend in with irregular migrants or collaborate with other terrorist groups like the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party (MLKP) and the PKK.
According to figures released by Yerlikaya’s office last month, some 16% of fugitive members of FETÖ are believed to be in the United States and 23% in Germany.
