Arrest warrants were issued for 29 suspects and 13 were detained on Friday as the security forces cracked down on members of the Gülenist Terror Group (FETÖ). Arrests were the result of an investigation by the Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office in the capital Ankara of the financial activities of the group’s members, seeking to revive FETÖ after the group failed to seize power in a 2016 coup attempt.
According to a statement by Prosecutor’s Office, in accordance with the digital evidence and photo identification, 29 suspects were taken into custody with the testimony of suspects collaborating with the police. It was detected that those suspects were funding FETÖ.
Suspects were taken into custody in 10 cities as part of an investigation carried out by the Bureau of Investigation of Terror Crimes. 18 of the suspects were financing FETÖ, eight of them were "cash couriers," one of them was a "legal counselor," and one of them was running the safe houses, known as "gaybubet (absence) houses" in FETÖ jargon.
Examining the digital evidence seized within the scope of the operation, the Ankara Police Department Anti-Terror Branch Office (TEM) teams found information on intra-organizational instructions and money traffic in dispatch, which was brought back by data scraping and decryption. Suspects, who collaborated with the police, talked about the organization’s financial activities and money traffic.
With this information, in the first operation carried out on Jan. 5, suspects, including a secret network of FETÖ members, tried to revive the activities of the terrorist group in the aftermath of their failed coup attempt and the organization's financiers were caught.
While two of the suspects used effective remorse to tell what they knew about the organization, three people, two of whom were lawyers, were arrested.
Police units also obtained new information about the companies established for financing the terrorist organization, their activities, their contacts abroad, the organization's new meeting order and the identities of them accountable. It has been discovered that the organization has established companies in Turkey, the U.S. and Ireland or used companies that support the already established organization to obtain financing, that some of the companies are a front, and that organizational information exchanges are made online meetings held within the scope of company studies. In addition, the connections of companies with the organization abroad and their methods of money flow were deciphered. It has been revealed that most of the exported, imprisoned, or released officers, who are a part of the current organization that wants to revive the former activities, are also financed through these companies.
It was discovered that former Ministry of Treasury and Finance employees expelled for their suspected links to FETÖ coordinated the inter-company business and transactions of the organization. Authorities identified M.K., a FETÖ member who fled abroad, as one of the figures behind the "revival" efforts.
A.Ç, one of the suspects accused of financing the group, is the son of former Rear Admiral Y.Ç., who served as the Foça West Task Group Command and ordered ships under his command to sail during the July 15 coup attempt. S.A., another suspect, was the son of expelled colonel B.A. while the suspect O.A. was an expelled air officer.
FETÖ has been under intense scrutiny since the July 15, 2016 coup attempt its infiltrators in the army carried out. The Ministry of National Defense announced in June that 24,387 members of the Turkish Armed Forces (TSK) were sacked since the coup attempt for possible ties to the group, while administrative inquiries are underway for 781 others.