https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/w...sing-g62v5d2kg
Commandos accused of taking part in failed Turkish coup go missing
Two Turkish commandos who sought asylum in Greece over their alleged involvement in the botched coup against President Erdogan have gone missing from police custody and may already be in the hands of Turkey, their lawyer said yesterday.
Halit Cetin and Fatih Arik fled to Greece months after their unit, the SAT special operations force, led the failed Turkish coup in July 2016. The men, dubbed “public enemy No 1” by the Turkish government, claimed political asylum and were placed in detention for 18 months for illegal entry. However, according to Stavroula Tomara, their lawyer, the men went missing on August 20, the day the detention order ran out, and may have been spirited back to Turkey in a prisoner exchange.
“I went to collect them and they were gone,” she told a Greek television channel. “I seriously doubt the two commandos are in Greece any more. They have either been bundled up and taken to a third country or deported back to Turkey. No one has the authority to transfer my clients to any secret location. They should have walked free.”
Ms Tomara alleged that her clients may have been exchanged for two Greek soldiers who were returned to Greece on August 15 after being held for five months by Turkey on suspicion of espionage. She claimed that her clients may have been taken away under duress in similar circumstances to three of their comrades, who arrived in Greece with Mr Cetin and Mr Arik but quickly disappeared. “The day [the three comrades] were arrested and requested political asylum they were taken to a local hotel,” she said. “They were served dinner and as they were eating, a team of hooded Greek commandos burst into their room, strapped them and returned them back to Turkey.”
Ms Tomara also said that the whereabouts of eight Turkish officers who arrived by helicopter after the 2016 coup attempt was unknown since they were moved from a military camp in Agios Andreas on the outskirts of Athens when wildfires razed the region last month, killing 96 people.
Theodore Chronopoulos, a senior Greek police spokesman, said that Mr Cetin and Mr Arik’s release order came through last week but the two men “were immediately taken to a secret location following a separate request they had made to the authorities for their protection”. He declined to comment on Ms Tomara’s allegations.
Thousands of Turkish citizens have fled to Greece to escape the post-coup purges of state apparatus by Mr Erdogan’s government. The asylum claims of elite Turkish commandos have strained relations between Greece and Turkey, bringing them to their lowest point since the neighbouring states came to the brink of war in 1996. Although Athens has rejected a string of extradition requests by Turkey, the government of Alexis Tsipras has billed the military defectors as “putchists”, tacitly agreeing with Turkey’s claims that they played an instrumental role in the ill-fated coup attempt.
Last week Dimitris Kammenos, an independent Greek MP, submitted a letter of inquiry to parliament demanding explanations about the fate of the Turkish commandos.
European Union and Greek law forbids extradition to a country where an alleged offender could be at the risk of torture — a claim that the two Turkish commandos and eight officers have repeatedly made.