“He cannot escape divine justice,” President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said Tuesday as he commented on the demise of Fetullah Gülen, the U.S.-based leader of the Gülenist Terror Group (FETÖ). Erdoğan lamented that Gülen dodged being tried in the country where he was born for a wide array of crimes.
Gülen, who died of natural causes in Pennsylvania, is a chief defendant in several trials in Türkiye, where he has been tried in absentia. His name will likely be dropped from trials as this is a legal practice for deceased defendants. But the public will not forget it any time soon as Gülen was involved in a bloody coup that killed 252 people in 2016.
He had several arrest warrants in investigations related to the July 15 coup attempt eight years ago, and evidence revealed that he openly instructed his followers to carry out the coup.
The first hearing he skipped was in the main trial of the coup attempt, informally known as the “Office of Chief of Staff trial,” which involved the abduction of army chiefs and other major actions of putschists. The trial concluded in June 2019 with aggravated life sentences for 127 defendants and life sentences for 23 others.
The terrorist group is known for its widespread infiltration of the army, law enforcement, the judiciary and bureaucracy. It first attempted to overthrow the government in 2013 with its infiltrators in the judiciary and the Turkish National Police. It failed, and the group faced increased scrutiny. When news broke that the military was preparing to launch a mass purge of FETÖ-linked officers in August 2016, the group moved to prevent it with the coup attempt. Strong public resistance ultimately stopped the coup, and most of those involved in the coup attempt were arrested. Gülen, however, and 12 others, mostly civilian members of the terrorist group, remained at large. Birol Kurubaş, an "imam" or handler for FETÖ's military infiltrators, was among the few civilians sentenced in that trial.
Tens of thousands of people were detained or arrested following the coup attempt, and a barrage of trials was launched against FETÖ, both for its role in the attempt and for other crimes.
Prior to the coup attempt, Gülen was the chief defendant in a trial over FETÖ’s wrongdoings where 73 were tried, including executives of a broadcaster and newspaper that served as the mouthpiece of the terrorist group.
His name also came up in a trial over the 2016 murder of Russian Ambassador Andrey Karlov. Gülen is accused of ordering the hit on Karlov, who was assassinated by a FETÖ-linked off-duty police officer. Again, Gülen is accused of ordering the murder, which was plotted by Mustafa Özcan, one of the lieutenants of the FETÖ ringleader.
Another assassination he is implicated in is the killing of Necip Hablemitoğlu, a prominent academic who was killed in 2002 as he was writing an expose on the terrorist group.
The actions of FETÖ encompass a wide variety of criminal offenses, from illegal wiretapping to sham trials. Invariably, all are attempts to stifle the group’s critics and obtain more power within the state. To achieve its goals, FETÖ utilized everything, including fraud, forgery and murder.
FETÖ was also involved in several high-profile trials, Ergenekon and Balyoz (Sledgehammer). The Ergenekon conspiracy probe, dating back to 2007, led to a series of trials of military officers, politicians, academics and journalists alleged to be members of Ergenekon, a clandestine organization accused of plotting against the government.
They were convicted in 2013, but the Supreme Court of Appeals later overturned hundreds of convictions in the case. Later, Turkish authorities announced that the 2013 Ergenekon trial was based on fabricated evidence and blamed the prosecutors, who were FETÖ member soldiers, for trying to purge the military of rival officers.
In the Balyoz case, hundreds of Turkish military personnel, including high-ranking generals, were convicted for plotting a coup against the then-newly elected Justice and Development Party (AK Party) government in 2003.
In early 2015, an Istanbul high court overturned the convictions against all 236 suspects and acquitted them.
In what investigators call the first attempt to harm the government, FETÖ-linked prosecutors and police officers tried to question and subsequently detain Hakan Fidan, then-director of the National Intelligence Organization (MIT).
MIT, which plays a key role in bringing members of the terrorist group to justice following the organization's coup attempt, has frequently been targeted by FETÖ, which tried to infiltrate the intelligence service as it did the military, law enforcement and judiciary.
The Feb. 9, 2012 incident was a plot to establish a link between the intelligence service and the PKK terrorist group through a sham investigation concocted by FETÖ-linked prosecutors and police chiefs. Fidan did not go to the courthouse to testify, upon the instructions of then-Prime Minister Erdoğan, narrowly escaping an arrest that could have triggered a crisis.
FETÖ is also implicated in a long-running scheme wherein handlers stole the questions for public personnel selection exams like the KPSS and distributed them to members to place its infiltrators in the bureaucracy, military and law enforcement.
FETÖ handlers who managed so-called student homes also aimed to ensure the candidates would score high on the exam by coding the levels of the suspects’ loyalty to the terrorist organization.
