Turkish authorities on Tuesday detained 24 suspects in an investigation on fraud in public personnel selection exams committed by the Gülenist Terror Group (FETÖ).
Some 21 suspects are charged with passing a 2012 deputy tax inspector exam by stealing and aiding the distribution of the questions, according to a statement from the Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office in the capital Ankara.
Another suspect, rumored to be the “provincial accountant” of the central Konya city, was found to be a ByLock user, an encrypted messaging app developed and exclusively used by FETÖ members. The suspect is charged in an investigation on the 2010 KPSS exam fraud.
Two other suspects are being probed for staying in FETÖ’s student homes and using the ByLock app.
FETÖ uses student homes to raise infiltrators to be placed in Turkish state institutions. The terrorist group is also known for stealing questions and answers to promotion exams to help its members rise in the ranks in the bureaucracy, military and law enforcement, and has been subject to numerous investigations on this issue.
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. FETÖ is also implicated in a string of cases related to its alleged plots to imprison its critics, money laundering, fraud and forgery.
The group faced increased scrutiny 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.
Hundreds of investigations launched after the attempt sped up the collapse of the group’s far-reaching network in the country. FETÖ was already under the spotlight following two separate attempts to overthrow the government in 2013 through its infiltrators.
The terrorist group faces operations almost daily as investigators still try to unravel their massive network of infiltrators everywhere but an unknown number of FETÖ members, mostly high-ranking figures, fled Türkiye when the coup attempt was thwarted.
In 2024 alone, police apprehended hundreds of FETÖ suspects across the country, including fugitives on western borders trying to flee to Europe.
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 code-named “Garson” ("Waiter"), who was behind the group’s July 2016 coup.
