هذا التقرير متاح أيضًا بـ العربية
Ten years after the failed coup attempt in Türkiye, the judicial and security file remains active, with rulings that have settled a large part of the responsibility for planning and execution, while other cases have been sent back to the courts or remain open because of appeals and fugitives.
Over the same decade, prosecutions expanded from direct participants to military, civilian, financial, and media networks affiliated with the Fethullah Gulen movement, which is accused of carrying out the attempt, while the battle moved beyond the country into a long track of extradition requests and legal and diplomatic pursuits.
According to data published by Türkiye’s Justice Ministry in July 2026, first-instance rulings were issued in 289 cases linked to the coup attempt against 8,725 defendants. Of those, 241 cases completed the appeals and cassation stages, while other cases remained open because of retrials, appeals, or the flight of defendants.
Trials from the night of the coup attempt in Türkiye
1- Akinci and the core of aerial planning
The Akinci Air Base near Ankara stood at the center of the broadest and most complex case, as the indictment presented the base as the air command headquarters of the coup attempt and the place where officers and civilians accused by prosecutors gathered to plan and direct air sorties, detain military commanders, and bomb Parliament, police headquarters, and special forces facilities.
The case began against 469 defendants, including officers, pilots, and four civilians whom the indictment identified as organizational handlers of the movement’s secret military structure: Kemal Batmaz, Hakan Cicek, Nurettin Oruç, and Harun Biniş.
The indictment placed Adil Oksuz at the center of planning inside Akinci Base, presenting him as the civilian overseer of the Air Force’s secret structure, while his escape prevented the completion of his trial and the enforcement of judicial measures against him.
The court of first instance issued its ruling on Nov. 26, 2020, imposing sentences on a number of defendants that in some cases reached 77 aggravated life terms for a single person, because of the number of killings, the facilities targeted, and the acts attributed to each defendant.
The file passed through the regional appeals court in June 2022, and its review then reached Türkiye’s Court of Cassation, the highest authority for appeals in criminal and civil rulings.
On Dec. 19, 2023, the court’s third chamber upheld rulings concerning 430 defendants, including convictions, acquittals, and dismissals, and overturned the rulings against 39 defendants for reconsideration of the legal classification or completion of the review and reasoning.
Among the names linked to the aerial bombing of Parliament were Hasan Husnu Balikci, Huseyin Turk, and Ugur Uzunoglu, in addition to pilots accused of targeting special forces headquarters and the air police command and designating targets for other aircraft.
2- General Staff headquarters and the retrial of 149 defendants
The General Staff headquarters case dealt with what took place inside the military command headquarters in Ankara, including the detention of then-Chief of Staff Hulusi Akar and force commanders, the mobilization of officers and soldiers, and the formation of what the coup documents called the “Peace at Home Council.”
The trial began against 224 defendants and included a number of the highest-ranking military officers accused of participating in the leadership or providing military cover for the attempt. The first-instance ruling was issued on June 20, 2019.
Former Air Force commander Akin Ozturk was the most prominent among those convicted, and he, along with a group of senior defendants, was sentenced to 138 aggravated life terms each for killings, attempting to overthrow the constitutional order, and detaining commanders.
On July 17, 2024, the Court of Cassation completed its main review of the file, upholding the rulings against 17 defendants from the leadership circle and overturning the rulings against 149 defendants because of inadequate reasoning or shortcomings in examining the facts and evidence.
Their retrial began on April 21, 2025, and the court continued hearing arguments and final statements through May 2026, with no published final ruling from this round as of mid-July 2026.
3- Marmaris and the rulings closest to finality
The Marmaris case was tied to the armed group that headed to the hotel where Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had been staying on the night of the attempt, shortly after he had left, and clashed with police officers, killing two policemen and wounding others.
The case began against 47 defendants. Among the most prominent names was Gokhan Sahin Sonmezates, whom prosecutors presented as the commander of the operation team, along with Zekeriya Kuzu and a number of special forces and aviation officers.
The Mugla court issued its ruling on Oct. 4, 2017, sentencing 31 defendants to four aggravated life terms each and imposing life sentences on three other defendants, alongside fixed-term sentences and acquittals.
On March 22, 2019, the Court of Cassation upheld the rulings against the main group. A limited number of defendants were later retried, including Ali Yazici, Erdogan’s former military aide, after an overturning related to the characterization of his role and the appropriate sentence. The process ended with his reconviction and a harsher sentence.
The executive core of the case reached a high degree of finality, with fugitive defendants and subsidiary files related to looting and theft of property during the operation still outstanding.
This differs from the General Staff headquarters case, where the retrial covered a broad bloc of defendants, and from the July 15 Bridge file, whose retrial ruling remained pending clear final documentation before the Court of Cassation.
4- Istanbul’s two bridges and retrial files
The case of the Bosphorus Bridge, later renamed the July 15 Martyrs Bridge, was among the most sensitive because 34 people were killed and large numbers of civilians were wounded as the deployed forces tried to shut it down and block movement between the two sides of Istanbul.
The trial began against 143 defendants, and the first-instance ruling was issued on July 12, 2018. Seventy-two defendants were sentenced to aggravated life imprisonment, 22 were sentenced to 17 years and seven months in prison, five were sentenced to 15 years, and 44 defendants were acquitted.
On Dec. 15, 2022, the Court of Cassation overturned part of the rulings and sent 82 defendants back to court. The retrial ruling was issued on Sept. 15, 2023, against 81 defendants, including three aggravated life sentences, prison terms of 14 years and seven months for 20 defendants, and 12 years and six months for nine defendants, along with 47 acquittals.
As for the Fatih Sultan Mehmet Bridge, the original indictment covered 61 people over the closure of the bridge, the killing of three people, and the wounding of 49.
A direct ruling was issued on April 4, 2018, against 15 detained defendants: 13 were sentenced to aggravated life imprisonment and two to life imprisonment.
Why have the prosecutions continued after 10 years?
After the larger part of the cases involving direct execution was settled, investigations shifted to dismantling the secret structure the Gulen movement had built inside the armed forces and state institutions, and pursuing its civilian, financial, and media networks, along with circles of financing, sheltering, and reorganization.
The subsequent investigations relied on data collected over years, allowing new cases to be opened and organizational links to be rebuilt among officers, employees, and civilians who were not included in the first trials.
Türkiye’s Court of Cassation and Constitutional Court held that the ByLock application was used as a closed communication tool within the Gulen movement, and gave server and account data and user identities major weight in proving membership when linked to other indicia.
Prosecutors also relied on the pattern of sequential calls from public pay phones, on the basis that officials in the secret military structure used shared lines to communicate with multiple officers away from their personal phones, which made it possible to open new cases and connect old records with confessions, testimony, and organizational data.
The indicia also included transactions at Bank Asya, the movement-linked bank that the state placed under its administration before shutting it down, especially deposits that coincided with internal calls to support it during its crisis.
The evidence also extended to work inside the movement’s institutions, a person’s place in its organizational hierarchy, testimony from former members, and providing funding or housing for wanted individuals and helping conceal them, with the weight of each element varying according to the context of the case and its connection to other evidence.
The use of this evidence sparked disagreement with the European Court of Human Rights. In 2023, the Grand Chamber examined the case of Yuksel Yalcin Kaya, a Turkish teacher convicted in 2017 of membership in an armed organization and sentenced to more than six years in prison based on his use of the ByLock application, his membership in a union and an association, and his transactions with Bank Asya.
The court held that the Turkish judiciary had moved from proving use of the application to inferring membership in an almost automatic manner, without sufficient individualized examination of the nature of that use and its actual connection to the organizational structure.
That approach extended in July 2025 to the ruling in Demirhan and Others and subsequent follow-up rulings, while Turkish courts continued to rely on ByLock and sequential calls within the body of evidence, provided their significance was assessed according to the circumstances of each case.
The continued extraction of data, the expansion of investigations into membership and financing networks, retrials after cassation rulings, and the dispute over the evaluation of evidence all helped keep prosecutions open through July 2026.
Prosecutions outside Türkiye
Türkiye expanded its pursuit of wanted individuals abroad through extradition requests, international notices, and judicial and security cooperation with the countries where they reside. Results varied according to each country’s laws, rules of evidence and extradition, and the residency and asylum status obtained by some of the wanted individuals.
This variation is tied to the multiple tracks Türkiye used to bring back wanted individuals. Judicial extradition passes through the courts of the requested state and is subject to the examination of treaties, dual criminality, the strength of the evidence, and the person’s legal status.
Administrative deportation or removal, meanwhile, is tied to immigration, residency, and internal security laws, and may end with the person being returned to Türkiye without a judicial ruling on the substance of the Turkish case. There is also security or intelligence cooperation.
Kosovo returned six Turkish citizens in March 2018 in a security operation that sparked disagreement within the Kosovar government over how it was carried out.
In Moldova, the European Court of Human Rights condemned the way Turkish teachers were expelled and held the Moldovan authorities responsible for violating legal safeguards.
Courts rejected some Turkish requests in Britain, Greece, Sweden, and Bosnia and Herzegovina on the basis of asylum rules, dual criminality, the assessment of evidence, and the safeguards required under those countries’ laws.
Germany received the largest number of Turkish requests, and its name repeatedly surfaced in files involving military officers, diplomats, and former judges who left Türkiye after 2016.
The United States remained the most prominent arena in the case of Fethullah Gulen himself, who was never extradited before his death in Pennsylvania on Oct. 20, 2024, despite the requests and files submitted by Ankara.
Türkiye also turned to the International Criminal Police Organization, Interpol, to circulate data on wanted individuals, while requests for red notices are subject to review under the organization’s rules, including Article 3 of its constitution and controls related to people who have refugee status.
Adil Oksuz remains the heaviest name among the fugitives because his name appears at the forefront of those accused of planning inside Akinci Base and because he is regarded as the civilian overseer of the movement’s Air Force structure. He was detained after the attempt, then released and disappeared, and since then his name has remained present in Ankara’s requests to Germany, without any complete public track emerging that led to his arrest or extradition.
Alongside him is Akin Ipek, the businessman accused of managing and financing institutions linked to the movement, whose extradition was rejected by the British judiciary, and Ekrem Dumanli, the former editor-in-chief of Zaman newspaper, part of Gulen’s media network, in addition to former prosecutors Zekeriya Oz and Celal Kara, who are wanted in files related to the movement’s structure inside the judiciary.
After Gulen’s death, Türkiye’s pursuit shifted to the leaders who run the movement’s institutions, financial resources, and educational and media networks abroad.
The names Mustafa Ozcan and Cevdet Turkyolu surfaced in reports related to the struggle over leadership and control of funds, while determining their location and current judicial role still requires more recent public documentation.
The prosecutions outside Türkiye encapsulate a path different from the domestic one: Inside the country, the state moved toward broad trials and continuous operations.
Outside it, however, it entered a slower and more complex battle, in which outcomes are subject to foreign court rulings, asylum and extradition laws, standards of evidence, and the nature of political and judicial cooperation with Ankara leaving a number of the most prominent wanted individuals beyond the reach of Turkish rulings and procedures 10 years on.