Avni: New plot under way to blame Gülen movement for PKK attacks

A whistleblower who tweets under the pseudonym Fuat Avni has claimed that President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his accomplices have devised a new plot against the faith-based Gülen movement, also known as the Hizmet movement, in which they will place blame for the recent increasing violence across Turkey on the movement.

In successive tweets posted on Thursday, Avni claimed Erdoğan and his bureaucrats are planning to make the Gülen movement, inspired by Turkish Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen, a scapegoat for the recent fatal attacks by the terrorist Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), adding that a new plot has been put in place via pro-government media outlets that would depict the movement as having pushed the terrorist organization to restart its attacks against Turkish security forces.

The whistleblower said the pro-government media will report that those police officers close to the movement will leak intelligence to PKK terrorists to prevent planned military operations from being conducted against the PKK.

Noting that experienced intelligence and terrorism police experts who had conducted an effective fight against the PKK in the Southeast were reassigned by former Interior Minister Efkan Ala, Fuat Avni said the chief of the National Police Department's intelligence unit, Engin Dinç, had prevented operations from being conducted against the PKK and radical terrorists the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). Avni also said the PKK took the advantage of the security gap in the region and stockpiled guns, rockets and bombs in the the eastern and southeastern regions.

Saying the plot against the Gülen movement will be conducted by a group led by Dinç, Avni said as part of the plot the websites of individuals and companies inspired by the movement will be hacked and the group will send orders from those websites to individuals from the PKK. By doing so, the whistleblower says Erdoğan and his clique want to create the perception that the movement was the one that triggered the recent PKK attacks.

Avni also said a hacker named Alper Yılmaz had been brought in from the US to hack the websites of those individuals and companies close to the movement.

Claiming that there is another plot under way against the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) in which Erdoğan and his cronies want to push the party below the 10 percent electoral threshold by instigating PKK sympathizers to take to the streets, Avni added that the recent PKK attacks are expected to make the HDP lose the support of many voters in the event of a snap election.

The Justice and Development Party (AK Party), one of whose founders is Erdoğan, lost its parliamentary majority for the first time since 2002 after the HDP passed the 10 percent electoral threshold in the June 7 general election.

Avni also said Erdoğan and his accomplices are trying to set the stage for a nationwide state of emergency, further claiming those PKK members close to the National Intelligence Organization (MİT) are behind the recent fatal PKK attacks.

The whistleblower also claimed Dinç had deliberately ignored intelligence and did not take any security measures to prevent successive attacks that targeted HDP rallies and buildings before the June 7 election and the suicide bomb attack in Suruç on July 20. A total of 33 activists were killed and 100 were injured in the Suruç bombing in Şanlıurfa province.

Since the Suruç bombing, there has been a surge in violent confrontations between the government and the PKK in southeastern Turkey. Two police officers were killed by PKK members in Ceylanpınar on July 22 in retaliation for the Suruç attack. The PKK then carried out further attacks on members of the military and the police. PKK terrorists have killed more than 30 members of the Turkish security forces in the last three weeks.

Published on Today's Zaman, 13 August 2015, Thursday