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Tag: Chief Public Prosecutor’

  • Turkish nationalist party deputy chair defends AfD as neither racist nor anti-Muslim

    Turkish nationalist party deputy chair defends AfD as neither racist nor anti-Muslim

    A deputy chair of Turkey’s far-right Patriotic Party (VP) has denied accusations that the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) is racist or hostile to Turks and Muslims, saying Turkish associates of his party have joined the AfD.

    Descriptions of the AfD as fascist, racist or hostile to Islam were lies spread by “globalists” seeking to turn Asian nations against the party, Ethem Sancak said in remarks published Thursday by the T24 news website.

    “Some of our friends have joined the AfD,” Sancak said, referring to members of Germany’s Turkish community.

    Some of them may secure posts in the party because the VP and the AfD have “very good relations,” he added.

    The comments came days after the AfD won 43.8 percent of the vote and 39 of 83 seats in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt.

    The party fell three seats short of a majority and is seeking allies, while Germany’s mainstream parties have maintained their refusal to work with it.

    The AfD campaigned on broader deportations, renewed ties with Russia, an end to German support for Ukraine and Germany’s withdrawal from the eurozone.

    Chancellor Friedrich Merz accused the party of promoting “ethnic cleansing” through its “remigration” policy, while the AfD said its proposals concerned only people without legal residence.

    The AfD’s Saxony-Anhalt branch has been designated as a confirmed right-wing extremist group by the state’s domestic intelligence agency since 2023.

    Germany’s federal domestic intelligence agency made the same finding about the party nationwide in 2025, but a Cologne court blocked the designation in February pending a final ruling.

    The Turkish community in Germany warned after the election that the AfD’s rise could fuel violence against migrants and members of religious and other minority groups.

    Sancak is a businessman who served on the top decision-making body of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) before resigning in 2022 and joining the VP, which advocates closer ties with Russia and Turkey’s withdrawal from NATO.

  • Turkey probes TR724 news outlet over coverage of crackdown on Süleymanlılar religious group

    Turkey probes TR724 news outlet over coverage of crackdown on Süleymanlılar religious group

     

    Turkish prosecutors have launched an investigation into TR724, a Turkish media outlet established by journalists in exile, over its coverage of an ongoing crackdown on the Süleymanlılar religious community and developments surrounding the suspicious death of one of its former leaders.

    The Bakırköy Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office said on September 10 that it had opened the investigation under Article 217/A of the Turkish Penal Code, commonly known as Turkey’s “disinformation law,” accusing TR724 of publishing “false, manipulative and misleading” content about the 2016 death of former transport minister Arif Ahmet Denizolgun, who was also a former leader of the Süleymanlılar.

    The prosecutor’s office did not identify a specific TR724 report, piece of information or statement that it considered false or explain what evidence contradicted the outlet’s reporting.

    Prosecutors said they instructed the İstanbul Police Department’s security branch to identify statements made in TR724’s social media broadcasts, establish the identities and addresses of the people involved and carry out the necessary judicial procedures.

    The statement did not announce detention warrants for any TR724 journalists.

    TR724 described the investigation as an attempt to silence the outlet over its coverage of the crackdown on the Süleymanlılar, a religious community that has not endorsed President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), saying it has closely followed the operations since they began in August and reported both the authorities’ allegations and developments surrounding Denizolgun’s death.

    The former minister’s death in 2016 became the subject of a renewed investigation this year, leading to the exhumation of his remains in August.

    Prosecutors later recovered video of his original autopsy after authorities had initially said no recording could be found. A subsequent forensic report classified his death as suspicious and said an intentional killing could not be ruled out.

    The findings led prosecutors to investigate current Süleymanlılar leader Alihan Kuriş and several others for murder.

    Despite these developments having been publicly announced by the authorities, the Bakırköy prosecutor’s office did not specify which part of TR724’s reporting it considers false or misleading.

    Police launched raids across 17 provinces on August 13 as part of the crackdown targeting Süleymanlılar, in an Ankara-based investigation involving allegations including running a criminal organization, money laundering, fraud and tax violations.

    Prosecutors issued detention warrants for 49 people in the first phase, and Kuriş and 31 others were subsequently jailed pending trial. The investigation later expanded, with additional arrests and the seizure of companies and associations linked to the group.

    Justice Minister Akın Gürlek has denied that the government is targeting a religious group, describing the case as a financial crimes investigation directed at its leadership. He said Thursday that Turkey had also requested judicial assistance from Germany over transfers of funds abroad.

    The Süleymanlılar have never built close ties with Erdoğan or the AKP and have at times backed opposition parties. Observers view the operation as a warning that religious communities could face state pressure if their political positions displeased the government.

    The operations followed months of criticism of the group by politicians and media figures close to the government.

    The Süleymanlılar trace their roots to Quran teaching begun by Islamic scholar Süleyman Hilmi Tunahan in the 1920s and now run courses, dormitories, charities and businesses in Turkey and Europe.

    Article 217/A, which took effect in 2022, makes it a criminal offense punishable by up to three years in prison to publicly disseminate false information on certain matters in a way deemed capable of causing fear, panic or concern. Press freedom groups have repeatedly called for its repeal, saying it has been used to criminalize legitimate journalism.

  • Turkey detains 20 in raids over alleged Gülen movement links

    Turkey detains 20 in raids over alleged Gülen movement links

    Turkish police have detained 20 people in raids across six provinces over alleged links to the faith-based Gülen movement, the state-run TRT Haber reported Friday.

    The operation was carried out at 21 locations under the coordination of the İstanbul Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office as part of an investigation into what Turkish authorities describe as the movement’s covert network within the police. Those detained comprise five currently serving civil servants, three who had previously been dismissed from public service and 12 private-sector employees.

    Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has targeted the faith-based Gülen movement, inspired by Muslim cleric Fethullah Gülen, who died in 2024, since corruption investigations in December 2013 implicated him as well as some members of his family and inner circle. He dismissed the probes as a Gülenist conspiracy and designated the movement as a terrorist organization in May 2016, intensifying a sweeping crackdown after a coup attempt in July of the same year that he accused Gülen of orchestrating. The movement denies involvement in the attempted coup or any terrorist activity.

    Authorities said the suspects were identified in data stored on an SD card provided by a secret witness codenamed “Garson” (waiter). Investigators also cited alleged contacts with members of the movement, accounts or increased deposits at the now-shuttered Bank Asya and records of sequential payphone calls. Prosecutors allege the suspects operated at a supervisory level in the movement’s purported network within the police.

    The files supplied by Garson have been used in numerous criminal and administrative cases involving police officers accused of Gülen links. Turkey’s Constitutional Court ruled in June that authorities had failed to sufficiently verify and explain the use of the files in the dismissal of a former police officer and ordered a retrial in the case.

    The so-called “payphone investigations” are based on call records. The prosecutors allege that a member of the Gülen movement used a single payphone to consecutively call all his contacts. Based on that assumption, when an alleged member of the movement is found in call records, it is assumed that other numbers called right before or after the primary call also belong to people with Gülen links. The authorities do not possess the content of the calls in question. The supposition of guilt is solely based on the order of the calls made from the phone.

    Since the coup attempt in 2016, the Turkish government has accepted such activities as having an account at the now-shuttered Bank Asya, one of Turkey’s largest commercial banks at the time; using the ByLock messaging application, an encrypted messaging app that was available on Apple’s App Store and Google Play; and subscribing to the now-shut-down Zaman daily or other publications affiliated with members of the movement as benchmarks for identifying and arresting alleged followers of the Gülen movement on charges of membership in a terrorist organization.

    This article is republished from the Stockholm Center for Freedom.