Türkiye The Turkish government has openly said that it has been pursuing Turkish nationals abroad allegedly affiliated with the movement led by US-based Sunni Muslim cleric Fethullah Gülen. The Turkish authorities consider the Gulen movement responsible for masterminding the July 15, 2016, attempted military coup. In a televised interview in 2018, Deputy Prime Minister Bekir Bozdağ said that Türkiye’s intelligence service had abducted 80 Turkish nationals from 18 countries for their alleged links to the Gülen movement. Türkiye’s official Anatolian Agency news agency has also regularly published information about individuals the Turkish National Intelligence Agency has brought back to Türkiye and detained pending trial. Human Rights Watch is aware of several cases in which Turkish authorities abducted Turkish nationals and removed them to Türkiye, bypassing legal processes and court orders abroad. Ayten Öztürk, who was tried in 2019 for links with the armed group Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party/Front, was abducted in 2018 from Beirut airport, Lebanon, by Turkish intelligence services and taken to Türkiye, where she was forcibly disappeared and tortured for over five months before being officially registered in police custody. Selhaddin Gülen, nephew of Fethllah Gülen, went missing in May 2021 while traveling to Kenya to marry his fiancé, a Kenyan national. Despite being a registered asylum seeker in Kenya, he was under a deportation order from the Kenyan authorities, based on an Interpol Red Notice from Türkiye, which required him to report weekly to the Directorate of Criminal Investigations headquarters in Nairobi. On one of these visits, he vanished. Photographs were released several weeks later of him in handcuffs in Ankara. Orhan İnandı, whom the Turkish government accused of links to the Gulen movement in 2019, was abducted in Kyrgyzstan with the involvement of the Turkish authorities in May 2021. One week after he went missing, İnandı resurfaced in police custody in Ankara. After the May 2023 elections, Türkiye’s intelligence agency continued the practice of organizing the abduction and rendition to Türkiye of individuals with alleged associations with the Gülen movement in collaboration with authorities in countries with weak rule of law frameworks. In July and September, Tajik authorities bypassed legal extradition processes by abducting Emsal Koç and Koray Vural before they were flown to Türkiye, where they were placed in pretrial detention pending trial. 19 HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH | FEBRUARY 2024