Erdogan’s guards among 9,000 suspended officers

Bloomberg

Turkey suspended 9,000 police officers, including more than a dozen tasked with protecting President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his family, extending a crackdown on suspected followers of a U.S.-based cleric who the government blames for orchestrating last year’s attempted coup.
The officers were suspended for ties to the “terrorist network of Fethullah Gulen and for posing a threat to national security,” according to a police statement issued late Wednesday. Some had earlier been assigned to oversee legal probes into suspected Gulenists, it said. The move came several hours after prosecutors ordered the detention of more than 3,000 people, mostly civilians, on suspicion of overseeing a secret structure within the police force.
Turkey has suspended or fired nearly 150,000 people, including thousands of police officers, for links to Gulen, who has repeatedly denied the charges against him.