Turkey announced it will offer compensation and a monthly income to the families of those killed or injured during last month’s failed coup attempt.
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Turkey has accused Gulen of masterminding the thwarted July 15 military coup to overthrow President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and has asked the United States to extradite him.
All victims will receive optional individual retirement plans, Soylu added. Over 13,000 people have been detained in connection with the coup, while about 250 people died during the coup attempt.
An additional 60,000 from various institutions have been fired or suspended as Erdogan consolidates even more power in the coup aftermath.
After a week of heated name-calling between Vienna and Ankara, Sebastian Kurz suggested the bloc should end membership talks with Turkey, saying the country was moving “further and further away from the European Union”.
“We have to face reality: the membership negotiations are now no more than fiction”, Kern told the Die Presse newspaper in comments published Thursday. “We’re looking through them”. Turkey, however, has not provided such evidence, Weingarten said.
Weingarten noted on Friday that extradition was a legal process in the United States and subject to a treaty with Turkey.
Lawyers for Gulen said the extradition demand “is political in nature” and not backed by evidence. “We have read concerns from Turkey that Mr. Gulen, this elderly, frail religious leader, is going to flee to another country”, said attorney Reid Weingarten on Friday, calling such allegations “absurd”.
On July 15, a faction of the Turkish military declared it was in control of the country and the government was no more in charge.Tanks, helicopters, and soldiers then clashed with police and people on the streets of the capital, Ankara, and Istanbul.
Turkey on Thursday issued a warrant for Gulen’s arrest for allegedly ordering the failed coup, a move seen as a prelude to a formal extradition request.
Afterwards, US Secretary of State John Kerry will visit Turkey.
His comments echo those of Austria’s far-right Heinz-Christian Strache who said on Saturday that Erdogan’s use of the failed putsch in July to crack down on his opponents was reminiscent of Hitler’s use of the Reichstag blaze to amass greater power. On Friday, Anadolu said 12 journalists who used to work for Zaman newspaper were formally arrested pending trial, including columnist Mumtazer Turkone.
Separately, Germany’s Sueddeutsche Zeitung reported a German woman had been arrested in Turkey on suspicion of belonging to the Gulen movement.
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Information for this article was contributed by Suzan Fraser, Edith Lederer, Maria Danilova and Geir Moulson of The Associated Press; and by Chris Strohm and Bradley Saacks of Bloomberg News.
