COUP SURPRISED ITS PLOTTERS.

Two F-16s had president’s plane in their sights

ISTANBUL • It had been planned for weeks, but in the end, even the coup plotters were taken by surprise.

The some 300 putschists had heard that the Turkish government was about to issue arrest warrants for soldiers accused of supporting Fethullah Gulen, an Islamist cleric and longtime foe of the president, who lives in selfimposed exile in the U.S.

So, they advanced their plans to Friday night in what would turn out to be a doomed attempt to catch the government before it caught them.

While the government has been keen to suggest a small band of low-ranking dissenters were behind the coup, a new report and the released names of military figures linked to the plot suggests it ran much deeper.

Akin Ozturk, the man thought to have been the mastermind, is a former air forces commander and Turkish Supreme Military Council member.

He led a group that included the president’s own top military adviser, the commander of the main airbase used by U.S. troops to launch airstrikes against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, and the commander of the powerful Second Army.

The report, which appeared in the local Cumhuriyet newspaper, would explain why the events unravelled so quickly.

“The beginning of the coup felt very rushed, but the planning of it was not. That’s important,” Oktay Vural, MP from the nationalist opposition party MHP, told The Daily Telegraph.

It emerged that at the height of the attempt to topple President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the rebel pilots of two F-16 fighter jets had Erdogan’s plane in their sights. The Turkish leader was returning to Istanbul from a holiday near the coastal resort of Marmaris when at least two F-16s harassed Erdogan’s plane while it was in the air and en route to Istanbul.

“Why they didn’t fire is a mystery,” one former military officer with knowledge of the event said. Erdogan said as the coup unfolded that the plotters had tried to attack him and had bombed places he had been at shortly after he left. He “evaded death by minutes.”

Around 25 soldiers in helicopters descended on his hotel in Marmaris on ropes, shooting, just after Erdogan had left in an apparent attempt to seize him.

The report was just another of the lingering mysteries on Friday night.

Around a dozen individuals have been named as among the coup plotters, but in Erdogan’s Turkey it is difficult to distinguish between real foe and political challenger. Among the names was Ali Yazici, Erdogan’s military aide, who would be the closest to Erdogan’s inner circle to have been involved in the plot, if he was.

A defiant president addressed a large crowd at a funeral of one of the victims Sunday, vowing to purge all state institutions of supporters of Gulen.

He said Turkey would request an extradition order for the cleric so that he could stand trial in Ankara.

Erdogan wasted no time is cleaning out his military. Thousands of officers, soldiers and other suspects linked to the failed coup have been arrested, authorities said Sunday.

The country’s justice minister said that as many as 6,000 people had been detained.

Gulen has insisted that he had nothing to do with the uprising and suggested that Erdogan could have staged the attack in order to legitimize a fresh crackdown on the judiciary and military.