Ankara prosecutor demands release of 1,000 FETÖ suspects after Bylock investigation

ANKARA

The Ankara Public Prosecutor’s Office has demanded the release of 1,000 Fethullahist Terrorist Organization (FETÖ) suspects detained for using Bylock, an encrypted smartphone messaging application, after they determined that around 11,000 telephone numbers were directed to the application’s server through an online application called Mor Beyin.

“We will demand the release of some 1,000 imprisoned people in different cities who were detected as being directed to the ByLock through Mor Beyin, if there isn’t any other evidence against them,” Yüksel Kocaman, the Ankara Chief Public Prosecutor, said on Dec. 27.

His comments came after the Public Prosecutor’s Office declared that some 11,480 mobile telephone numbers were directed to the ByLock servers through a free-to-download application called Mor Beyin, advising legal authorities to revise the legal status of the suspects being tried or convicted over their usage of the encrypted messaging system.

“Legal authorities should revise the legal status of the users of the GSM numbers which were detected as being directed to the ByLock servers without their knowledge and will along with the evidences in their investigation files,” the statement read.

“After detailed investigation, it was detected that 11,480 GSM numbers which have similar characteristics concerning their link and data parameters, were directed to the ByLock IP’s against their will,” the statement read.

The statement underlined that applications like Mor Beyin was “developed by FETÖ members.”

“It was discovered that these users were deliberately directed to the bylock.net domain, by the use of the applications developed by the organization members in order to make the detection of real ByLock users difficult and to complicate the struggle against FETÖ,” it said.

It also stated that the investigation over the developers of the application is still ongoing, while the discoveries were conveyed to the public prosecutors of the cities, and regional courts of justice chief prosecutors.

Kocaman has said ByLock remained to be the primary evidence of the cases against FETÖ, stating that they are investigating a former Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK) officer, Cengiz Erbakıcı, as the developer of Mor Beyin.

“We have initiated an investigation against this individual. And we filed a search warrant on his name,” Kocaman said.

In June, the Information and Communication Technologies Authority (BTK) had conveyed a list of 102,000 people who used ByLock to public prosecutors amid denials of some suspects of using the encrypted messaging app.

It was stressed that FETÖ had developed different applications in 2014, to distort the information to be received from ByLock servers that was the base of BTK’s investigation.