This Case Will Last a “Thousand Years”!..

We are talking about the February 28 case, which was opened after the passing of Necmettin Erbakan, the Prime Minister of the Refah-Yol Government, and which the AKP and its media fully embraced, delivering a verdict before the court even did.

At the time, the laws and National Security Council (MGK) decisions in force were ignored, it was revealed that the judicial members who opened the case and conducted the trial were “FETÖ” members, experts stated that the “evidence is fake,” and the vast majority of the politicians from that period who were heard as witnesses in the trial said that February 28 was not a coup; none of this mattered to anyone. According to them, February 28 was a “coup,” and the rest was just a story!..

The trial of 102 retired soldiers and the then-President of the Council of Higher Education (YÖK), Prof. Kemal Gürüz, lasted 5 years. In the end, the court of first instance sentenced 21 individuals, including Gürüz, to life imprisonment. For the other defendants, decisions of acquittal or dismissal due to the statute of limitations were issued.

The appellate court upheld these decisions exactly.

The 3rd Criminal Chamber of the Court of Cassation, 2 years ago, upheld the life sentences for 14 defendants while ruling that 4 individuals should be punished for “aiding a coup,” and that 12 defendants, whose cases were dismissed or who were acquitted due to the 10-year statute of limitations, had committed the crime of “secret alliance.”

While 8 of the 14 commanders, aged between 70 and 90, whose sentences were upheld, were released from prison over time due to “health reasons” or Erdoğan's pardon for “infirmity,” retired Lieutenant General Vural Avar passed away in a painful manner at Sincan Prison.

After this loss, the Ministry of Justice made some new arrangements regarding the acquisition of Forensic Medicine reports for elderly and sick detainees and convicts, but 5 commanders are still in prison. Despite the “infirmity” report issued by the Forensic Medicine Institute for them as well, their files have been waiting on Erdoğan's desk for months.

BACK TO THE VERY BEGINNING OF THE CASE

Let us come to the situation of the 16 individuals whose retrial began after the Court of Cassation's decision and the course of the case. In the process, two of those commanders also passed away without seeing the outcome of the case.

The Prosecutor, who presented his opinion on the merits at the fourth hearing of the retrial in June 2022, requested that the Court of Cassation's ruling be complied with, meaning that 4 individuals be punished for “aiding a coup” and the others for the crime of “secret alliance.” The court adjourned the hearing to November 2022 to take the defendants' defenses.

However, when that day arrived, a surprising development occurred:

The court accepted some of the defense attorneys' requests regarding the “expansion of the prosecution.” This meant returning to the very beginning of the case, not only for the commanders being retried but also for the commanders in prison. In other words, it was emerging that some of the evidence used as the basis for the verdict was suspicious, meaning the February 28 defendants did not receive a fair trial.

Because defense attorney Aykanat Kaçmaz, after years, retrieved what were called the “original evidence of the case file” from the judicial repository and demonstrated that the vast majority of these so-called documents were the same proven-fake documents used in the Balyoz and Ergenekon plots, and requested that they be examined by experts. The court decided that the documents in question should be sent to the Forensic Medicine Institute, TÜBİTAK, the Gendarmerie, and the Police Criminal laboratories for examination.

Furthermore, the court had accepted the request to ask the General Staff whether the original or a photocopy of the “destruction record” regarding the meeting allegedly held on April 7, 1997, existed.

While the case was following such a course, let us underline that the Constitutional Court rejected the individual application of the commanders in prison on the grounds that there was “no violation of rights” and continue.

In the 6th hearing last March, the response from the General Staff came: “As a result of the examination of the archives and records, no document or record regarding the destruction of the meeting minutes dated April 7, 1997, has been found.”

Regarding the documents the court decided to have examined—while other institutions reported that they had no such duty—the Forensic Medicine Institute requested the entire file physically and on CD.

We are talking about a file consisting of hundreds of thousands of pages. Will the examination of this ever end; God knows!..

Indeed, no result has come from the Forensic Medicine Institute in the past 7 months.

NEW FORGERIES FOUND

The 7th hearing of this case will be held today.

The defendants and their attorneys had previously revealed that the “security number” on the so-called documents, which were ruled to have been prepared by the Western Study Group (BÇG), was fake, as this practice in the TSK began 5 years after February 28, on June 5, 2002.

Before today's hearing, one of the defense attorneys, Aykanat Kaçmaz, detected some other forgeries. Attorney Kaçmaz, who determined that the numbers appearing to be stamped with a numbering machine on the documents in the February 28 case exactly match the so-called documents understood to be plots in the “Headquarters Houses” file, not just Balyoz and Ergenekon, will once again request the expansion of the prosecution.

Attorney Kaçmaz's assessment regarding this new development is as follows:

“Whoever produced CD-5 in the February 28 case on July 25, 2007, are the same people who produced the evidence in the Headquarters Houses case. Furthermore, the fact that many documents within CD-5 contain numbers, numbering systems, QR codes, different confidentiality levels, different templates, and fonts that were not in use at that time is another fact showing that the documents are a FETÖ plot.”

This is the latest situation in the case, which is entering its 11th year and where 5 commanders are still serving their sentences in prison.

One final note: Attorney Aykanat Kaçmaz asked about the fate of the files of these 5 commanders, for whom the Forensic Medicine Institute issued an “infirmity” report and the Ministry of Justice sent to the Presidency; however, he did not receive any response from the Presidency.