Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya announced on Monday that a former police chief involved in a conspiracy against a former leader of the main opposition party and other politicians was captured in the capital of Ankara. The suspect, identified only by his initials Ü.Y., was a member of the Gülenist Terror Group (FETÖ), which is blamed for a string of plots against politicians.
Ankara police launched an operation on a residence in the capital after detecting Ü.Y. was hiding there. The suspect was found in a secret compartment of a flat.
Yerlikaya said the suspect was a member of the police intelligence department between 2008 and 2014 and was serving as a police chief when he was expelled from law enforcement in 2016 for his suspected links to FETÖ. He was wanted for a string of offenses including illegal wiretapping and recording of videos of obscene nature involving the late leader of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), Deniz Baykal, as well as illegal recording of audio and video belonging to other politicians, lawmakers. Separately, Ü.Y. was wanted on charges of forgery in official documents and abuse of duty and was identified as a user of Bylock, an encrypted messaging app developed and exclusively used by FETÖ members.
The minister congratulated the Ankara governor, prosecutor and police units carrying out the investigation and operation and vowed to “capture members of FETÖ one by one.”
In 2022, a court in the capital sentenced 120 defendants linked to FETÖ to various prison terms in a trial over secretly recorded sex tapes of politicians. The suspects, mostly former police intelligence officers, were accused of planting secret cameras in places where several politicians, including Deniz Baykal, met their girlfriends, often for extramarital affairs. Baykal resigned from his post in 2010, shortly after the tape was leaked online. Others, mostly lawmakers from the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), had also stepped down from their posts after their videos were published online. Some defendants were already imprisoned on charges unrelated to the case, mostly stemming from FETÖ membership or involvement in the July 15, 2016 coup attempt instigated by the terrorist group’s infiltrators in the Turkish Armed Forces (TSK). The prosecutor has asked for harsh prison terms for defendants he accused of running an extensive, illegal surveillance operation to record the tapes about the private lives of Baykal and others and use the footage for “political gains.”
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