Over 150 military staff arrested in Turkiye over links to Fethullah Gulen

ISTANBUL: In a major development, Turkish police on Tuesday arrested 158 members of the military over suspected links to Fethullah Gulen, who was accused of masterminding a failed 2016 coup, the public prosecutor´s office in Istanbul said.

Gulen, a cleric who died in 2024, was once a close ally of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan before the two became bitter enemies.

He relocated to the United States in 1999 and never returned.

The government accuses Gulen's Hizmet movement of seeking to establish a "parallel state".

Around 50 other members of the military were arrested in late May.

The prosecutor's office said that a search was still underway for another 18 members of the military.

It said that the arrests mainly concerned the army.

Authorities have detained close to 26,000 people accused of belonging to the Hizmet movement since the 2016 failed coup.

More than 9,000 of them have been jailed, according to Turkish justice authorities.