CENTRAL NEWS –
The documents published by the Nordic Monitor website included secret statistical data kept by the intelligence department of the Turkish gendarmerie from 1 January 2014, to 30 June 2016, and made clear that the Turkish courts had convicted only 224 people, 37% of the total 607 detainees.
In the same period, the Gendarmerie, which has wide authority as a law enforcement agency in the border and rural areas, arrested 311 Turkish terrorists, only 39% of whom were convicted by the Turkish judiciary, and the rest were released.
The Swedish site pointed out that these figures represent a small part of the real numbers, in light of the lack of intelligence documents to comprehensive inventory of the number of detainees, prepared by the police department.
The website said that the data did not provide any information on the number of detainees released during the trial, while the Nordic Monitor noted that the majority of individuals who were arrested on charges of belonging to Daesh and al-Qaeda organizations in Turkey were released quickly during the course of legal procedures in the court.
In the Turkish criminal justice system, the real number of convictions of terrorists was very low because of the lenient political environment provided by the AKP towards non-Kurds. It pointed out that the authorities provided a picture of the real figures based on official records about what happened in those years with regard to foreigners who arrived in Turkey on their way to join the terrorist organizations active in Rojava and Bashur, especially Daesh and al- Qaeda.
The Swedish site confirmed that the period from 2014 to 2016 witnessed a significant increase in the number of foreign fighters who came to Turkey on their way to join the terrorist organizations in Syria, and added, “In 2014, only eight people arrived to Ankara, coming from Macedonia, Kosovo, Albania and Azerbaijan, and they were arrested by the Gendarmerie. The following year, the number reached 499, and the list of countries they came from expanded to include the United States, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Sweden, Finland, Japan, China, Russia, India and others.”
The intelligence documents divided foreign detainees into terrorists, collaborators, sympathizers, and instigators, and did not have any information on how the Turkish army registered detainees according to different classifications, and what criteria were used to distinguish them.
The figures showed that the number of foreign and Turkish detainees reached 700 men, while the number of women was 202 women and 16 children.
