Amnesty International recently said it had gathered “credible evidence that detainees in Turkey are subjected to beatings and torture, including rape”.
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As of January 13, Turkey had 179,611 people in its jails, which have a capacity of 183,871, according to the prisons administration.
Western allies worry President Tayyip Erdogan, already accused by opponents of creeping authoritarianism, is using the crackdown to target dissent, testing relations with a key North Atlantic Treaty Organisation partner in the war on Islamic State.
The announcement is part of a decree made Wednesday, to make room in jails for the thousands of people it’s arrested in recent weeks for allegedly participating in a failed coup attempt.
Today’s decrees, published in the Official Gazette, also ordered the dismissal of 2,360 more police officers, more than 100 military personnel and 196 staff at Turkey’s information and communication technology authority, BTK.
“If the USA does not send him (Gulen) to Turkey, relations will not be the same as they were before July 15”, Bozdag said, warning Washington not to “lose” the Turkish people.
European Affairs Minister Omer Celik urged the Germany government to close all businesses that had any link to Gulen.
Another measure in the decrees gave the president more choice in appointing the head of the armed forces.
With concern also surging over the authorities’ attitude on press freedom, security forces sealed and raided the premises of the pro-Kurdish daily Ozgur Gundem following a court order to shut it down.
Police detained 44 of them Monday morning. In purges of the military, police, civil service and judiciary, 79,900 people had been removed from public duty, he said in a speech broadcast live on television. It names a total 111 defendants, including 13 people who are already in custody.
Turkey requested the extradition of Gulen, who denies being involved in the military uprising and condemned the attempted coup.
But officials say they have to act fast to prevent further attempts by Gulen’s “parallel state” to destabilize the government from within the bureaucracy and business community.
“As a result of Ankara’s domestic and foreign policy that has been Islamised step-by-step above all since 2011, Turkey has developed into the central platform of action for Islamist groups in the Middle East region”, the document goes on.
The West worries Erdogan is using the coup to stifle dissent.
Turkey’s Foreign Ministry said Germany was guilty of double standards and that it should be more supportive of Turkey in its fight against the militant Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), listed as a terrorist group by the European Union and the United States.
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It is believed that more than forty thousand citizens have been arrested since July, and nearly eighty thousand have been dismissed from their public duty.
