Civilian prosecutors submitted the indictment to İstanbul Deputy Chief Public Prosecutor Turan Çolakkadı on Wednesday. Çolakkadı accepted the indictment and forwarded it to the İstanbul 13th High Criminal Court. The court is expected to examine the indictment and decide within 15 days whether to integrate it to the Ergenekon case or return it to prosecutors for further work.
The indictment, which is more than 1,000 pages long, points to former İstanbul Mayor Bedrettin Dalan as the prime suspect in the alleged plot. The document stands as the eighth indictment in the Ergenekon investigation.
Titled the Action Plan to Fight Reactionaryism, the plot in question was reportedly drafted by Col. Dursun Çiçek and suggests that the Turkish Armed Forces (TSK) made systematic preparations to damage the image of the ruling AK Party government and the faith-based Gülen movement in the eyes of the public, to play down the Ergenekon investigation and to garner support for members of the military arrested as part of the Ergenekon inquest.
Ergenekon suspect-at-large Dalan is the prime suspect in the indictment. The document also mentions six other suspects, including lawyer Serdar Öztürk, National Intelligence Organization (MİT) employee Özel Yılmaz, Dalan’s personal assistant İlhami Ümit, Aydınlık Editor-in-Chief Deniz Yıldırım and the security chief of Ulusal TV, Ufuk Akkaya.
The indictment reportedly recommends life sentences without the possibility of parole for Dalan and Col. Çiçek on charges of working to bring down the government and membership in an armed terrorist organization. The indictment calls for prison terms of at least seven-and-a-half years for the other suspects.
Dalan is the founder of the İstek Foundation, on whose land in Poyrazköy a large number of weapons and a sizable amount of ammunition were found buried last year in an excavation carried out as part of the investigation into Ergenekon.
