Turkish police on Friday detained 10 people in İstanbul and Eskişehir for allegedly giving money to former army captain Burkay Karatepe while he was at large, nearly 10 years after prosecutors accused him of taking part in an operation to assassinate President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan during a coup attempt on July 15, 2016.
Police raided 10 locations, five in each city, seized digital material and planned to take the detainees to the southwestern province of Muğla for questioning.
Investigators identified the 10 after examining devices seized from Karatepe, according to reports citing the investigation.
Reports available Friday afternoon did not name them, provide transaction records, amounts or dates, specify the charges being considered against the 10 or contain responses from them or their lawyers.
Karatepe was detained in the western province of Afyonkarahisar on August 1 and jailed pending trial in Muğla on August 5 after nearly 10 years at large.
Turkey’s Interior Ministry says he piloted a helicopter for the 37-member military unit sent to Marmaris, a resort town on Turkey’s Aegean coast, and was its last member still at large.
Prosecutors say the unit went to the hotel where Erdoğan was staying but that he had left before the soldiers arrived.
Two police officers were killed during the operation.
The coup attempt as a whole killed 251 people and injured more than 2,000.
Karatepe faces charges of attempting to assassinate the president, murder, military offenses and armed nighttime robbery at a residence, but he has not been convicted in this case.
His case was separated from the main Marmaris trial while he was at large.
A Muğla court in 2017 sentenced 34 of 47 defendants to four aggravated life terms, and the Supreme Court of Appeals upheld the main convictions in 2022.
Several defendants have challenged the government’s description of the Marmaris mission as an assassination operation.
Gökhan Şahin Sönmezateş, a former brigadier general convicted in the case, told the court that his unit had orders to detain Erdoğan rather than kill him and that the soldiers had been “sent into a trap,” while denying ties to Gülen movement.
The Turkish government blames the coup attempt on the faith-based Gülen movement, inspired by the late Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen, which it designates as a terrorist organization. Other governments or major international bodies do not designate the movement as such.
Erdoğan began targeting the movement after corruption investigations in December 2013 implicated him, members of his family and his inner circle, and then stepped up the crackdown after the failed coup.
Gülen, who died in the US in 2024, denied any involvement in the coup or violence and called for an independent international investigation.
A 2017 inquiry by the UK Parliament found no evidence that the movement directed the coup.
The United States never approved requests made by Turkey to extradite Gülen because Ankara’s evidence did not meet US legal standards.
More than 126,000 people have been convicted of alleged Gülen links and 11,085 are in prison, while at least 134,000 public servants were dismissed, often through emergency decrees and without individual review.
United Nations bodies have documented arbitrary detention, denial of due process and torture in post-coup cases, while the European Court of Human Rights had found violations affecting 3,554 applicants by June under rulings that faulted Turkish courts for treating association and lawful acts as proof of terrorism.
