Sledgehammer (coup plan)

Operation Sledgehammer (Turkish Balyoz Harekâtı) is the name of an alleged Turkish secularist military coup plan dating back to 2003, in response to the conservative Justice and Development Party (AKP) gaining office.

Claims of the plot first surfaced in the liberal Taraf newspaper, which was passed documents detailing plans to bomb two Istanbul mosques and accuse Greece of shooting down a Turkish plane over the Aegean Sea. The plan was to stir up chaos and justify a military coup. The army said the plans had been discussed but only as part of a scenario-based planning exercise at a military seminar.

The case was heavily criticised by the political opposition for the suspected involvement of high-ranking bureaucrats and legal officials which were close to the Cemaat movement, an Islamist movement led by exiled cleric and (then) AKP ally Fethullah Gülen. Numerous legal flaws and improper procedures throughout the case, and the lack of a response by the government also drew concern. This included the case that the original Sledgehammer document, claimed to have been produced in 2003, was actually created using Microsoft Word 2007. Other irregularities included the forging of signatures of high-ranking military officers, such as that of Chief of General Staff Çetin Doğan.

In 2012 some 300 of the 365 suspects were sentenced to prison terms, while 34 suspects were acquitted. The case was to be appealed.

On 19 June 2014 all the accused were ordered released from prison, pending a retrial, after a finding by the Constitutional Court that their rights had been violated. The timing of the decision fuelled further accusations regarding the involvement of the Cemaat movement initially, since by 2014 the AKP and Gülen had fallen out with each other. Furthermore, the then-AKP Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan openly accused the Cemaat movement of infiltrating the judiciary following a government corruption scandal, beginning a large-scale operation of either removing or relocating judicial and law enforcement employees.

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