Turkish graft prosecutor removed

ISTANBUL - An Istanbul prosecutor who had been overseeing a corruption investigation of the prime minister’s inner circle was removed from the case Thursday, in a new sign of a power struggle within Turkey’s judiciary and police forces.

In leaving his position under pressure, the prosecutor, Muammer Akkas, issued a condemnation of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government, accusing it of interfering in the judiciary and preventing him from carrying out his work.

Akkas said that the government had prevented the police forces from pursuing a new round of suspects - including, according to several Turkish media reports, Erdogan’s son, whose name was on a summons to appear as a suspect that was leaked to the media Thursday evening - in the widening inquiry.

“The judiciary has clearly been pressured,” he said in the written statement, accusing his superiors of “committing a crime” for not carrying out arrest warrants, and saying that suspects had been allowed to “take precautions, flee and tamper with evidence.”

The prosecutor’s removal from the case came a day after the resignations of three ministers whose sons had been implicated. One of them, the environment and urban planning minister, Erdogan Bayraktar, broke precedent by calling for the prime minister to resign, too.

Soon afterward, Erdogan announced a broader overhaul of his Cabinet. Although some of the moves had been planned, so that certain ministers could stand for mayoral elections in March, the shake-up was widely seen as an effort to install loyalistsaround him.

The unfolding scandal has done significant political damage to Erdogan, who has been in power more than a decade and was widely considered a likely candidate in next summer’s presidential election, which for the first time will be determined by a national vote.

The corruption inquiry is centered on allegations of bribery involving vast real estate projects, many of them in Istanbul, that have become a hallmark of Erdogan’s time in power. No one has been convicted, but several people have been arrested, and one of the departing ministers Wednesday said that the prime minister himself had been involved in the real estate deals being subject to scrutiny.

As the crisis has deepened, Erdogan has taken to suggesting that the inquiry is a foreign plot, and in remarks published Thursday he said he believed that he was the ultimate target of the investigation.

Erdogan told the daily newspaper Hurriyet that those who tried to embroil him in the investigation would be “left empty-handed.” He had made the comments to reporters on a plane as he returned Tuesday from a visit to Pakistan.

After the prosecutor, Akkas, went public with his allegations of judicial interference, Istanbul’s chief prosecutor, Turhan Colakkadi, made his own remarks, saying that Akkas had been let go because he had been leaking information to the media.

Meanwhile, a higher judicial authority, the High Council of Judges and Prosecutors, which appoints judges and prosecutors and also oversees disciplinary actions against them, supported the ousted prosecutor. The council also condemned a recent government decree that required prosecutors to receive permission for investigations from ministers, calling it a blatant attempt to rein in the inquiry. The organization said that the new decree “violates the Constitution, and thosewho govern the country are subject to the supervision of the judiciary.”

The prosecutor’s removal Thursday was the newest and most direct step yet in a government purge of police and judiciary officials responsible for the inquiry.

Many officials within Turkey’s police and judiciary establishments are followers of Fethullah Gulen, an Islamic spiritual leader who lives in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania. Gulen and Erdogan represent competing Islamist traditions and once were partners in dismantling much of the structure of Turkey’s secular state, which ruled for decades with the military as the ultimate power. Now, the same police and judiciary officials that pursued the generals - and won, through a series of court cases that put many officers in prison - appear to be pursuing Erdogan’s government.

The investigation became public last week with a series of raids, and subsequent leaks to the media, and the government has dismissed dozens of police chiefs and many other lower-level officers.

Turkey’s opposition Thursday accused Erdogan of trying to rule via a secretive “deep state,” after the Cabinet reshuffle in which he moved to cement his control over the police by installing a key ally at the powerful Interior Ministry.

Erdogan “is trying to put together a Cabinet that will not show any opposition to him,” Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the head of the main opposition party, the Republican People’s Party, said in remarks reported by the Turkish media. “Erdogan has a deep state.”

The term “deep state” has a sinister connotation in Turkey and alludes to a murky group of operatives once thought to be linked tothe military that many Turks believed carried out operations outside democratic structures.

Information for this article was contributed by Dan Bilefsky and Mahmut Kaya of The New York Times.

Front Section, Pages 7 on 12/27/2013

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