A Turkish court yesterday interrupted the first hearing of a case against 86 members of a group of alleged coup plotters, saying the packed courtroom would not allow for a proper trial.
The hearing was interrupted shortly after it began, with dozens of spectators, supporters of the 86 suspects and journalists swarming into the tiny courtroom in Silivri, a town outside Istanbul.
Lawyers of the accused complained they did not have space even to use their laptop computers — the charge sheet alone was about 2,500 pages long — and protested that they could not work under such conditions, journalists who managed to enter the courtroom said.
“I have been doing this job for 50 years and a never saw such conditions,” one of the lawyers said.
Another attorney charged that the authorities did not provide the necessary conditions to “prevent us from ensuring properly the rights of the defense.”
The judge then ordered all except the suspects to leave the courtroom in order to decide how to proceed.
The prosecution charges that the suspects — alleged members of the ultranationalist Ergenekon group — instigated violence and planned assassinations to foment political turmoil in the country and topple the Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP).
The group allegedly hoped the chaos would prompt a military coup.
The army, which carries significant political clout, has toppled four governments in as many decades and threatened Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government last year with stepping in to safeguard secularism.
Hardcore secularists, among them the army, suspect the AKP of advancing a secret plan to introduce Islamic rule in Turkey. The party denies any such agenda and says it is loyal to the separation of state and religion.
The indictment holds Ergenekon responsible for at least two attacks initially blamed on Islamists — the 2006 bombing of the Cumhuriyet daily and an armed attack on a top court the same year in which a senior judge was killed.
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