Date posted: January 22, 2014

İSTANBUL

In the latest wave of personnel changes, nearly 500 police officials have been reassigned in Ankara and İzmir, as the government of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan scrambles to cover up a recent corruption scandal.

In İzmir, two deputy police chiefs and 10 commissioners were reassigned to different posts on Wednesday.

The current financial crimes unit deputy chief, Metin Tuncer, who was responsible for carrying out a far-reaching tender-rigging investigation into operations at the Port of İzmir, has been appointed as the deputy chief of the riot police unit.

In Ankara, at least 470 police officials and officers were removed from their posts and reassigned to different and less influential posts.

Corruption raids and arrests in mid-December implicated sons of three ministers, businessmen and a chief of the state bank, sparking a massive political turmoil in Turkey.

Erdoğan has reacted furiously to the corruption investigation, decrying an attempted “judicial coup” his supporters see as orchestrated by the Hizmet movement. He has reassigned thousands of police officers, more than a hundred judges and prosecutors, and purged official bodies of executives he suspects of being close to Turkish Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen.

Source: Todays Zaman , January 22, 2014

Tags: Defamation of Hizmet | Democracy | Hizmet (Gulen) movement | Turkey |