The government has blamed Friday’s failed coup – which it says killed 208 government supporters and 24 plotters – on backers of a US -based Muslim cleric who has become President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s chief opponent.
Advertisement
Fethullah Gulen is a former political ally of the Turkish president who is accused of swaying members of the military to carry out the coup attempt from his Poconos compound.
The Muslim cleric, living in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania, has denied any involvement. “I don’t believe this government will pay attention to anything that is not legally sound”.
White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said the US would follow procedures in a decades-old extradition treaty and called Turkish charges that the USA was harboring Gulen “factually incorrect”.
He was referring to what the government has long claimed is a state within a state controlled by followers of Gulen.
The crackdown that has been launched in Turkey following the coup, including the mass arrests of suspects and the talk of reviving the death penalty, has raised global concern.
In recent years, moves made by Erdogan and his AK Party have eroded the secularism seen as the bedrock of the modern Turkey founded by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.
“Leaders will have to get together and discuss it and if they accept to discuss it then I as President will approve any decision that comes out of the parliament”, he said.
They were all remanded in custody after a hearing that ended late Monday, the state-run Anadolu news agency said. Obtained before the attempted coup, the date of their publication was brought forward “in response to the government’s post-coup purges”, WikiLeaks said on its website.
The swift rounding up of judges and others after a failed coup in Turkey indicated the government had prepared a list beforehand, the European Union commissioner dealing with Turkey’s membership bid, Johannes Hahn, said on Monday.
In another development, police on Monday detained seven soldiers after searching the key Incirlik air base in southern Turkey used by the U.S. for air raids on IS jihadists, Anadolu reported.
Sources in Turkey’s Interior Ministry said on Monday that a total of 8,777 public personnel had been dismissed from their official positions since the coup against the government was declared.
But Washington isn’t the only capital under pressure to return Turkish citizens suspected of playing a role in last week’s coup. He had indicated a shake-up of the military was imminent and had also taken steps to increase his influence over the judiciary.
The top United Nations human rights official urged Turkey on Tuesday to uphold the rule of law in the wake of the failed coup and voiced “serious alarm” at the mass suspension of judges and prosecutors.
The Board of Higher Education issued the directive on Wednesday.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s spokesman denounced “revolting scenes of caprice and revenge against soldiers on the streets” after disturbing pictures emerged of the treatment of some detained suspects.
“Let me be very clear”, she said.
German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said: “Reintroduction of the death penalty would prevent successful negotiations to join the EU”.
In a bid to calm markets roiled by the coup attempt and the instability it revealed, Turkey’s central bank cut a key interest rate to shore up liquidity in the economy.
Advertisement
The agency said Erdogan’s Air Force adviser, Lt. Col. Erkan Kivrak, had been detained at a hotel where he was vacationing in Turkey’s southern province of Antalya.
