Turkish police have captured 90 people suspected to be infiltrators from the Gülenist Terror Group (FETÖ) in countrywide raids, Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya announced Thursday.
Intelligence officers and organized crime units captured the suspects in an operation codenamed "Clamp-18" conducted across 17 provinces over four days, including Ankara and Istanbul, as well as western Izmir, southeastern Şanlıurfa, Gaziantep and central Kayseri, Kütahya provinces, Yerlikaya said on X.
The suspects are charged with serving in the terrorist group’s so-called "secret formations" in the police force and courthouses, Yerlikaya noted.
Authorities found the suspects regularly made contact with FETÖ handlers through payphones – a common secret communication method for the group – and sheltered in the "gaybubet" ("absence") houses of FETÖ, Yerlikaya said.
"Absence" houses are used as safe houses by wanted FETÖ members who often forge IDs and rarely step out to avoid capture. A former member who testified to prosecutors said that the group's "absence" houses increased from 75 to 560 across Türkiye. Authorities believe that number might be even higher.
"They are either convicts or wanted suspects named in ongoing FETÖ investigations and testimonies," Yerlikaya said, adding that police seized a large number of digital materials, wads of cash in foreign currency, Turkish lira and other documents during the raids.
Türkiye has marked FETÖ as a security threat since December 2013, when the terrorist group emerged as the perpetrator of two coup attempts disguised as graft probes.
Prosecutors have found the group’s infiltrators in law enforcement, the judiciary, bureaucracy and the military had waged a long-running campaign to topple the government. FETÖ is also implicated in a string of cases related to its alleged plots to imprison its critics, money laundering, fraud and forgery.
FETÖ has been under more intense scrutiny since the July 15, 2016, coup attempt its infiltrators in the army carried out, which left 251 people dead and thousands more injured.
Following the attempt, a state of emergency was declared, and tens of thousands of people were detained, arrested or dismissed from public-sector jobs.
FETÖ still has backers in army ranks and civil institutions, but they managed to disguise their loyalty, as operations and investigations since the coup attempt have indicated.
The terrorist group faces operations almost daily as investigators still try to unravel their massive network of infiltrators everywhere. Since Yerlikaya took office in June 2023, police captured a total of 8,153 FETÖ suspects in 5,191 operations, arresting 1,518 of them.
Last year, Türkiye’s National Intelligence Organization (MIT) found that over 3,000 infiltrators of FETÖ were still active within the Turkish National Police after spending more than six years to decipher an encrypted database seized from a top FETÖ member codenamed "Garson" ("Waiter") who was behind the group’s July 2016 coup.
New statements of "Garson," an eyewitness in the case against FETÖ since surrendering in 2017, revealed the group maintained its surveillance on 320,000 members of the police for 16 years, up until its notorious first attempt to topple the government in December 2013, according to a report in the Turkish newspaper Sabah.
Encrypted lists of police officers show that each was assigned a code based on their links to FETÖ or opposition to the group’s infiltration. The lists, created by FETÖ handlers, rated the officers in terms of their "loyalty." They also helped other FETÖ members pinpoint which infiltrators should be "aided" in the promotion of their jobs.