Turkish police yesterday raided three major courts in Istanbul in search of more than 170 suspects wanted over last month’s attempted coup, reports said.
Police began searches of the city’s main Caglayan court and courts in the districts of Gaziosmanpasa and Bakirkoy with arrest warrants for 173 prosecutors and other judicial staff working there, the Dogan news agency said.
The accused are suspected of links to the US-based Islamic preacher Fethullah Gulen, who Ankara blames for the June 15 failed putsch against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
It was not clear how many suspects had been detained in the raids.
According to official figures, more than 35,000 people have been detained so far in the post-coup crackdown against alleged Gulen supporters, although 11,597 of these have since been released.
Erdogan has said the purge is needed to wipe out what he calls the “virus” of Gulen from Turkish institutions.
However, critics have expressed alarm that its sheer scope has turned it into a witch hunt.
In a separate development, the former chief prosecutor for the eastern region of Erzurum was detained late on Sunday while trying to cross into Syria.
Ekrem Beyaztas was caught by border guards just south of the Turkish town of Kilis, a Turkish official said, asking not to be named.
There was no indication over why he had been heading to Syria.
In other developments, the editor-in-chief of Turkey’s top opposition daily Cumhuriyet yesterday announced he was stepping down, saying he no longer had faith in the judiciary to hear an appeal in a controversial secrecy trial after the failed coup.
An Istanbul court had in May sentenced Can Dundar to five years and 10 months in prison for allegedly revealing state secrets in a story that infuriated Erdogan.
Dundar was allowed to go free pending appeal after the trial and is now believed to be in Germany. However, he said he would not surrender to the judiciary as the state of emergency imposed after the coup meant he would not get a fair hearing.
He said all the signs indicated a period of “lawlessness” was under way, and that the state of emergency was being used by the government as a pretext to arbitrarily control the judiciary.
“To trust such a judiciary would be like putting one’s head under the guillotine,” he wrote in a Cumhuriyet column titled “time to say farewell.”
“From now on, what we face would not be the court, but the government. No higher court would object to the lawlessness being carried out,” he said. “Therefore, I’ve decided not to surrender to this judiciary at least until the state of emergency is lifted.”
He said he would be passing on the post of editor-in-chief, but would remain writing articles as a columnist.
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