Turkey’s President Tayyip Erdogan said on Thursday the United States as a strategic partner should facilitate the extradition of the US -based cleric whom Ankara blames for orchestrating last month’s failed military coup. The government gave no reason for the reform.
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The official decree includes prisoners who served half their sentence and the ones who spent more than two years in jail. Excluded are those convicted of terrorism, murder, sexual assault and other violent crimes, officials said.
Around 38,000 convicted criminals will be released from Turkish prisons as the country is running out of space for alleged coup supporters.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan says the failed coup was masterminded by US -based cleric Fethullah Gulen and spearheaded by his followers within the military and other state institutions.
Bozdag announced a second decree Wednesday that would remove 2,300 more officers from the police force, as well as 136 military officers and 196 government employees from its information technology authority. Gulen has repeatedly denied any involvement.
Tens of thousands more people with suspected links to Gulen have been suspended or dismissed from their jobs in the judiciary, media, education, health care, military and local government.
He did not say why the reform was needed but Turkey’s prison population has trebled over the last 15 years.
Relations between Germany and Turkey have been fraught, with ties frayed over the German parliament’s decision to brand as genocide the World War I-era massacre of Armenians by Ottoman forces and also Ankara’s threat to back out of a crucial March deal with the European Union on migrants.
A prosecutor in the western province of Usak has submitted the first indictment formally accusing Gulen of masterminding the coup plot, the state-run Anadolu Agency said. It names a total 111 defendants, including 13 people who are already in custody.
“As a result of a gradual Islamisation domestic and foreign policy of Ankara since 2011, Turkey has developed into a central action platform for Islamist groups of the Near and Mid-East regions”, it quoted the document as saying.
He complained that no foreign leader had visited Turkey after the coup attempt, while France and Belgium received visits in solidarity after attacks there.
Wednesday’s decree provides for the release of 38,000 people.
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Turkey declared a three-month state of emergency on July 21.
