Hundreds of Turkish police arrested in wiretapping probe
The Turkish government has arrested hundreds of police officials through out the country for their supposed role in wiretapping that revealed widespread corruption within the government and its supporters in the business community.
The Daily Star reports that 100 police officials were arrested as the result of two separate investigations into the wiretapping. Most of the arrests took place in Istanbul, but arrests were also made in the capital of Ankara, the coastal city of Izmir, and the Kurdish redoubt of Diyarbakir.
In Istanbul alone, the authorities raided 200 different locations. Two of those arrested in Istanbul were former heads of the city's elite anti-terror squad, according to the Daily Star.
One of those arrested, a deputy chief of intelligence for the Istanbul police, struck a defiant chord when he was being escorted between locations by the arresting officers. Rather than walk with his head down and his eyes averted, he walked tall and thrust his cuffed hands in the air as the media swarmed around him.
Those arrested face various charges such as espionage, illegal wiretapping, forging official documents, violating privacy, fabricating evidence, and violating the secrecy of an investigation.
The prosecutors in this case claim they made the arrests because the officers abused their power by carrying out the wiretaps under the guise of an anti-terror operation when there was no evidence of terrorism, according to the Daily Star.
The prosecutors do not seem particularly interested investing the claims of corruption revealed by the wiretaps, which were shared on social media in 2013. The recordings implicated high-ranking government officials and their business connections in massive amounts of fraud and corruption worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
The recordings even implicated the prime minister himself, which is why the resources of the state's security apparatus have now been deployed against officers the prime minister views as a threat.
