Two motherless children aged 7 and 2 were left to the care of their relatives in different cities after their father was sent to prison last Thursday to serve a terrorism-related sentence due to his alleged ties to the Gülen movement, Bold Medya news website reported.
Muhammed Hanefi Aksoy was working at a student dormitory affiliated with the movement before it was shut down in 2016. He was sentenced to seven years, six months in prison on conviction of membership in a terrorist organization for working at a Gülen-affiliated institution, having an account at the now-closed Bank Asya, one of Turkey’s largest commercial banks at the time, and using the ByLock encrypted messaging app.
His wife Nagihan Aksoy died in September in a traffic accident. She was a former teacher dismissed from her job by an emergency decree due to her alleged links to the Gülen movement. Two-year-old Fatih is currently staying with his uncle in Yalova province, and Hümeyra is with her aunt in Nevşehir province, 700 kilometers away. Their father is in a prison in İzmir.
Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) government launched a war against the Gülen movement, a worldwide civic initiative inspired by the ideas of Muslim cleric Fethullah Gülen, after the corruption investigations of December 17-25, 2013 that implicated then-prime minister and current President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s family members and inner circle.
Dismissing the investigations as a Gülenist coup and conspiracy, the AKP government designated the movement as a terrorist organization and began to target its members. The government intensified the crackdown on the movement following a coup attempt on July 15, 2016 that they accused Gülen of masterminding. Gülen and the movement strongly deny involvement in the abortive putsch or any terrorist activity.
