Ulaanbaatar: A Turkish educator in Mongolia was briefly abducted on Friday, in what appeared to be the latest episode of a global campaign by Turkey’s president to capture suspected allies of the exiled cleric accused of plotting a 2016 coup attempt.
The educator, Veysel Akcay, runs a network of international schools that has been associated with exiled Turkish preacher Fethullah Gulen. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who blames Gulen for the failed coup, has purged tens of thousands of suspected Gulen supporters from government and military posts, and seized dozens of people from abroad.
Turkey has maintained that it extradites suspected Gulenists only with the permission of the foreign governments concerned. But the case of Akcay, who has lived in Mongolia for nearly 25 years, appears to cast doubt on that claim.
Akcay was near his apartment building in the capital, Ulaanbaatar, on Friday morning when he was bundled into a Toyota minivan, according to a colleague, Ganbat Batbuyan, who was in communication with Mongolian police. That account was corroborated by two other people, including another colleague and a senior Mongolian official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to discuss the case.
Ganbat, the Mongolian general director of the Empathy foundation, which runs the Mongolia-Turkish schools, said Mongolian police told him that the vehicle had a fake license plate and that three masked people were inside.
Several hours later, what the Mongolian Ministry of Foreign Affairs described as a Turkish-chartered aircraft landed at Ulaanbaatar’s airport. It was a Bombardier jet with a call sign matching that of a plane operated by the Turkish air force, according to an online flight-tracking service, Flightradar24.
As word leaked out about the aircraft Friday afternoon, Akcay’s friends and family congregated at the airport.
Later that afternoon, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a statement saying that the Mongolian government had ordered the flight grounded. Any seizure of Akcay, it added, would constitute an “unacceptable act of violation of Mongolia’s sovereignty and independence and Mongolia will strongly object.”
The jet left before 9:15pm, without Akcay on board. He was released several hours later, officials said.
In April, Bekir Bozdag, Turkey’s deputy prime minister, said in a television interview that Turkish intelligence operatives in 18 countries, including Kosovo and Malaysia, had seized dozens of Turks suspected of having links to Gulen and taken them back to Turkey.
Erdogan’s government has pressured foreign countries to shutter schools that it says are allied with the spiritual movement of Gulen, who now lives in Pennsylvania and has denied involvement in the attempted coup.
In 2016, for instance, the Turkish ambassador to Cambodia urged the closure of schools he said were linked to Gulen, whom he accused of running a “terrorist organisation.”
The same year, Turkish diplomats attempted to do the same with the educational network now run by Akcay, according to his colleagues.
The Turkish government accused six Turkish citizens who were deported from Kosovo on March 29, of having connections to Gulen, whose Islamic movement has garnered support in the Balkans, among other places.
Kosovo’s prime minister, Ramush Haradinaj, said he had not authorised the deportations, and he fired his interior minister and secret service chief on the grounds that they had known about the operation and failed to inform him in advance.
This month, Erdogan’s son visited Mongolia and met with high-level officials, according to a post on the Turkish Embassy’s Facebook page.
