German police raid homes of four imams

Allegations that they spied for Turkish president

BERLIN // German police yesterday searched the homes of four Turkish Muslim preachers on suspicion of spying for president Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government.

The imams are accused of reporting on Turkish followers of United States-based Islamic preacher Fethullah Gulen, who Mr Erdogan blames for last July’s failed coup attempt against him. The four imams allegedly passed on information through the Turkish consulate in the city of Cologne to the Turkish Religious Affairs Directorate, known as Diyanet, prosecutors said. “The purpose of today’s searches is to gather further evidence on the alleged activities of the accused,” police said after the raids in the states of North Rhine-Westphalia and Rhineland-Palatinate.

News site Spiegel reported the imams belong to Ditib, an organisation controlled by Ankara that manages some 900 mosques or religious communities in Germany. The Erdogan government has cracked down on followers of Mr Gulen, who denied being behind the attempted coup.

More than 41,000 people have been arrested over suspected links to Mr Gulen’s movement, and 100,000 fired or suspended. Many of them are teachers, police, magistrates and journalists.

The government said the purges were necessary to clean the state of the “virus” of the Gulen movement, which encouraged its members to work in public services. In Germany, thousands of Turkish citizens have applied for asylum, among them reportedly dozens of Turkish soldiers stationed at Nato bases. Germany is home to some three million people of Turkish origin, the biggest population of Turks in the world outside Turkey. German chancellor Angela Merkel’s government has repeatedly criticised the scale of Turkey’s crackdown and urged Mr Erdogan to safeguard civil liberties.

Mr Erdogan is exasperated that Germany has failed to extradite hundreds of suspects who are accused of being linked to the coup, the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party or the ultra-left.