Last Friday at seven thirty in the morning, Necdet Seyitoğlu left his house in Nairobi and got into the car of a friend and co-worker who was picking him up so they could go together to start a new workday.
“After 100 meters, a white Jeep vehicle blocked us in the middle of the road. Four people got out with their faces covered, they pointed their weapons at us and put us in the car,” Seyitoğlu tells elDiario.es.
At the same time, three other operations were taking place in three different parts of the city. Seven Turkish citizens – one of them also a British national – were captured by several plainclothes commandos. Necdet and two others were released. The other four, refugees, disappeared all weekend until finally on Monday at three-thirty in the afternoon Kenya confirmed that they had been expelled to Türkiye.
The seven are related to Hizmet, a religious community led by the preacher Fethullah Gülen, who died on the night of Sunday to Monday, and whom the president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, accuses of orchestrating the 2016 coup attempt.
“At first I thought they wanted to rob us, but then I realized they weren’t,” Seyitoğlu recalls. “They told us they were from the security service. “I asked for their identification, but they ordered me to remain silent.” While he was asking where they were going and what he had done, the Jeep was leaving the city of Nairobi, capital of Kenya. They covered their faces, handcuffed them and Seyitoğlu is sure that the car stopped on the outskirts of the city to change the license plates.
Desperate, he resorted to threats: “I told them I was a British citizen and that I would tell the embassy everything.” They then asked him if he had his passport with him, to which he responded no, but he showed them a photo he had on his phone. “They took a photo of the photo and sent it to someone,” he says.
Soon, the officers told them that they were going to separate Seyitoğlu and his friend and co-worker into two cars. “They put me in another vehicle and took me back to a rural area on the outskirts of Nairobi. They told me that my friend was coming behind, but it wasn’t true,” he says. His partner is one of those expelled without guarantees. In total, Seyitoğlu spent eight hours kidnapped and the commando kept his phone and computer. Once released, the professor, who arrived in Kenya in 2022 after living 18 years in the United Kingdom, took a taxi that took about 45 minutes to get home.
Since the coup attempt in 2016, Erdogan launched a secret operation with the intelligence services to capture and illegally bring his enemies to Türkiye. Forced disappearances and illegal arrests have been repeated in various parts of the world, including Kosovo, Moldova and Mongolia.
One of the latest cases occurred in Kyrgyzstan. Orhan Inandi, founder of the schools associated with the Gülen Movement in Kyrgyzstan, had lived in the country for 26 years and had nationality. Inandi disappeared on May 31, 2021. His family found his vehicle abandoned on the road seven kilometers from home, open and with flat tires, his relatives then told this medium. The man was missing for 35 days. Family and friends, convinced that he was being held at the Turkish embassy, organized daily protests. Finally, on July 6, Erdogan announced on television his capture and transfer to Türkiye.
All followers of Fethullah Gülen living outside Turkey are aware of this international kidnapping network, often carried out in cooperation between Turkish espionage and the secret service of the country in question. Other times, local authorities deny any type of collaboration. In Mongolia, for example, another Gülenist was kidnapped in 2018. His colleagues notified the authorities, who in turn quickly ordered a Turkish private jet that was waiting on the runway to be grounded. After several hours illegally detained in a car, the kidnappers had to release him without finishing the operation. The plane in question was registered in the name of a suspicious tourism and construction company located very close to the headquarters of the Turkish secret services in Ankara and which, more coincidentally, had been used for a similar operation against six Turkish citizens captured and deported. illegally from Kosovo a few months earlier.
For this reason, friends of Seyitoğlu and the rest of the detainees in Kenya spent the weekend at the airport trying to stop the illegal expulsion. “We were all taken about three hours from Nairobi, it wasn’t directly to the airport,” he says.
The friends arrived late. The news broke on Monday with a statement from the African country’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. “Kenya confirms that four nationals of the Republic of Türkiye were repatriated to their country on Friday at the request of Türkiye.” “Kenya accepted the request on the strength and robust and strategic relations between our countries. The four resided in Kenya as refugees,” the note acknowledges.
Among the seven captured there are two others who were also later released. One of them is a 16-year-old boy who was detained with his father. His version is very similar to Seyitoğlu’s. “A Jeep passed us, four masked men with guns pointed them at us and ordered us to get into the car. They handcuffed my father and put zip ties on me,” says the 16-year-old in a video published on networks to demand the release of those detained. “They blindfolded us, but out of the corner I could see license plates,” he adds, agreeing with Seyitoğlu’s story.
“They drove for two hours. When they realized I was 16, they took me to another car. I had to say goodbye to my father. They took me another two hours in the second car. His eyes were still covered and his hands were tied. Finally, they left me 500 meters from my house,” he says. “They took away my phone, my helmets, my shoes and my socks.”
The other person who was released is Saadet Taşçı, who was detained along with her husband in a third operation. “They kidnapped us in the garden of a government office where we went to get our driving licenses,” account in another video. “Four men armed with Kalashnikovs and covered in balaclavas put us in an SUV.”
“They took our shoes, watches and telephone. After an hour, they separated us into different cars,” says the woman. Both the 16-year-old’s father and Saadet Taşçı’s husband were returned to Türkiye.
Amnesty International has commented on the case, recalling that what happened “constitutes a violation of both Kenyan legislation and international law.” “These individuals are refugees who have requested protection from the Government of Kenya. The abduction and forcible return to the countries from which they fled directly violates the principle of non-refoulement enshrined in Kenyan law, the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees and the African Union Convention regulating the specific aspects of refugee problems in Africa,” recalls the organization.
The Turkish authorities and the media related to the Government have not yet commented on the operation. In other cases, they tend to remain silent until their targets set foot on Turkish soil, when they acknowledge the capture and even boast of the participation of their secret services. The kidnapping network is similar to the extraordinary rendition program launched by the US during the ‘war on terror’, with the difference that here everyone is returned to Turkey and ends up in prison.
In the case of Moldova, in which the Turkish and Moldovan secret services detained and expelled seven other Turkish educational workers in 2018, the European Court of Human Rights ordered the Moldovan government to compensate the victims.
“The material of the case indicates that the joint operation of the Moldovan and Turkish secret services was prepared long before September 6, 2018 [fecha de la detención]. “The fact that the applicants were transferred to Turkey on a plane sent solely for this purpose indicates that the operation was conceived and organized in such a way to catch them by surprise and that they would not have the time or the possibility to defend themselves,” the ruling stated.
Alerted by the reach and effectiveness of the network, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention and three special rapporteurs of the organization sent a letter to Erdoğan in May 2020 in which they expressed concern about what appeared to be “a systematic practice of extraterritorial kidnappings promoted by the State and the forced transfer of Turkish citizens from third countries to Turkey.” It was in 2017 when the intelligence services supposedly created a department in charge of directing operations abroad and to which the Government is believed to have allocated five million dollars to pay various criminal and illegal groups to catch the Gülenists marked on the list. black, the authors pointed out.
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