Turkish police have caught 13 suspects linked to the Gülenist Terror Group (FETÖ) in the western province Manisa, authorities said Wednesday.
The suspects were wanted by the prosecutors in an investigation on a FETÖ cell in the city’s Kula district.
FETÖ was behind a bloody coup attempt its infiltrators in the army carried out in Türkiye in July 2016, which killed 251 people and injured nearly 2,200 others. Under a state of emergency following the attempt, tens of thousands of people were detained, arrested or dismissed from public sector jobs.
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 was first marked as a security threat in December 2013 when it mounted two other coup attempts disguised as graft probes.
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.
Similarly, on Wednesday, the Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office in the capital Ankara announced 12 out of 33 suspects detained in connection to FETÖ’s infiltration in the Turkish land and air forces, opted to collaborate and named 133 people as FETÖ members.
Some of the suspects, including eight so-called “secret imams,” were sergeants still on active duty, the prosecutor’s office said.
