Ayşe Kaya, 30-year-old woman who gave birth to a baby at Eslife Private Hospital in İstanbul’s Esenyurt district early on Tuesday, was reportedly detained by police with her newborn baby later the same day as part of an investigation into Turkey’s Gülen group.
Turkish government has systematically been detaining women on coup charges either when they are pregnant or shortly after giving birth. This incident is the second in a week and 16th in the past 9 months.
On Monday, a group of police officers detained Derya Gül hours after she gave birth at Avrupa Hospital in the southern province of Adana.
Dozens of human tragedies in Turkey have been reported, part of the government witch-hunt against the Gülen movement, which the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) government along with President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan accuse of being behind the failed coup.
Turkey survived a military coup attempt on July 15 that killed over 240 people and wounded more than a thousand others. Immediately after the putsch, the AKP government along with Erdoğan pinned the blame on the Gülen group, inspired by US-based Turkish Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen.
The group denies the accusations.
In June, teacher Esra Demir was detained a day after giving birth in Batman as part of the witch-hunt targeting the Gülen movement.
In May, Aysun Aydemir, an English teacher who gave birth to a baby in a Cesarean procedure, was detained at the hospital for links to the Gülen movement and subsequently arrested by a court and put in pretrial detention with a three-day-old baby in Zonguldak province.
In late January, Fadime Günay, who had just given birth, was detained by police at Antalya’s Alanya Başkent Hospital as part of the same witch-hunt.
In early January, Ş.A., a former private school teacher and mother of a week-old premature infant, was taken into police custody over links to the movement while she was on her way to the hospital to feed the baby.
A day after Ş.A. was taken into police custody, another mother known as Meryem gave birth to twins by C-section at a hospital in Konya and was detained by police despite doctors’ reports that she should not travel and was taken to Aksaray from Konya in a police car.
According to recent data released by the Ministry of Justice, more than 2,250 mothers are held in penal institutions, of whom 520 are obliged to raise their 0 to 6-year-old children in prison.
A total of 138,148 people have been dismissed from their jobs, 118,235 detained and 55,927 arrested as part of a government crackdown following the failed coup last summer, a tally by TurkeyPurge.com said.
