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Old 30th Jan 2017, 06:49
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ORAC
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Purged Turkish officers seek asylum | World | The Times & The Sunday Times

More than three dozen high-ranking Turkish military officers have applied for asylum in Germany after being suspended from their duties since the failed military coup. The officers, who were all in Nato posts, were recalled to Turkey after the revolt on July 15.

Ankara has accused followers of the charismatic imam Fethullah Gulen, who lives in exile in the US, of orchestrating the coup by infiltrating the military over three decades. Mr Gulen has denied involvement. Those targeted appear to have extended far beyond the small group of Gulenists within the military to include secularists and any other officers not loyal to President Erdogan. The purge of the military has decimated Turkey’s personnel at Nato bases across Europe, with hundreds of officers working in the alliance’s command structures sacked or recalled, and arrested if they return home. Some of those caught up in the crackdown have warned that vacant Nato positions are being filled by Turkish officers who harbour anti-western, pro-Russian sentiments.

The Times has learnt that wives of military officers are also being arrested and imprisoned, apparently in an attempt to pressure their husbands into signing confessions that they were part of the coup attempt. Forty-one wives are in jail in Turkey, including one who is suffering from cancer. They are accused of paying a Gulenist-linked corruption ring for the answers to the entrance exam for government employment.

However, other wives, whose husbands were on Nato attachments at the time of the coup and have avoided arrest by not returning to Turkey, said that the payments were linked to a support fund set up for the widow of an officer killed in a battle with Kurdish PKK militants in 2015. The accusation that the payments were for the exam answers is, they say, a cover for their arrests. “I took this exam in 2010 and I started my job in the following year,” the wife of a naval officer said. “I wasn’t under any suspicion about this exam . . . But right after July 15 my husband was suspended from his duty, all because of the exam that I had taken.”

An EU intelligence report seen by The Times this month said that all the targets of the purge had been determined by Turkish intelligence services before July 15. Some 43,000 people are remanded in custody and 123,000 have been sacked over allegations of a connection with the attempted coup.
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