Turkey’s state-run news agency says police have detained dozens at Turkey’s banking regulatory agency and at one of Istanbul’s largest universities as part of an investigation into the July 15 abortive coup which killed over 270 people. He denies the charges. The scope of the crackdown has unnerved Turkey’s North Atlantic Treaty Organisation allies, who fear President Tayyip Erdogan is using the purges to stifle dissent.
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Deputy Prime Minister Mehmet Simsek said the government was in talks with banks to cut off funding to firms linked to Gulen.
The banking investigators are suspected of making examining the accounts of a government-related foundation and of business people, some with close ties to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
A BDDK spokesman was not immediately available for comment.
President Tayyip Erdogan has vowed to choke off businesses linked to US -based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom he blames for the July 15 coup attempt, describing his schools, firms and charities as “nests of terrorism”.
Separately, a court ordered that 187 suspects’ assets be seized, according to Anadolu.
He also said 4,262 companies and institutions with links to Gulen had been shut, and that 79,900 people had been removed from public duty in purges of the military, police, civil service and judiciary.
Also on Thursday, a court in the central Turkish city of Kayseri appointed state administrators to take over the businesses of the energy-to-furniture Boydak group, which has 14,000 employees, Anadolu said.
Turkey’s government has said the defeated coup, which left 240 people martyred and almost 2,200 injured, was organized by followers of Fetullah Gulen, who has lived in self-imposed exile in the USA state of Pennsylvania since 1999, and his FETO network.
Gulen, a reclusive cleric who has lived in self-exile in the United States since 1999, has been repeatedly accused of running a “parallel state” since a corruption scandal embroiling then premier Erdogan and several of his ministers erupted in 2013.
Gulen’s organization, which advocates philanthropy, interfaith dialogue and science-based education, has followers across Turkish society.
Meanwhile, detention orders were issued for 62 academics working at Istanbul University as part of the same investigation. Another 18 of their colleagues were set to be detained.
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On Thursday, police officers broke into two hundred workplaces and households, trying to find all the citizens that appeared in 187 arrest warrants issued by a chief prosecutor.
