Almost 300 Turks lost their lives in fighting with coup plotters on 15 July. <a target="_blank">(Photo: Reuters)</a>
Almost 300 Turks lost their lives in fighting with coup plotters on 15 July. (Photo: Reuters)

EU and the World

Leaked document sheds light on Turkey’s ‘controlled coup’

By Andrew Rettman and SELCUK GULTASLI,
Brussels
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The failed coup in Turkey in 2016 transformed its internal politics and EU relations.

But two and half years later, evidence is trickling out to support what the EU initially suspected – that president Recep Tayyip Erdogan knew what was going to happen and let it go ahead as a pretext to create one-man rule.

The new evidence recently came in the form of a document written by a Turkish prosecutor on 16 July 2016, and obtained by an investigative journalist, Ahmet Donmez, who lives in exile in Sweden.

The document is a detailed record of events which took place between the start of the coup and 5AM and 7AM that morning.

It said that putschists in the Turkish air force had bombed the parliament and the garden of the presidential palace, for instance.

They did so. But oddly enough, the prosecutor who minuted the events, Serdar Coskun, dated his record as having been written at 1AM – four hours before it all happened.

Coskun at first kept silent about the revelation.

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Almost 300 Turks lost their lives in fighting with coup plotters on 15 July. (Photo: Reuters)

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Author Bio

Andrew Rettman Andrew Rettman is EUobserver's foreign editor, writing about foreign and security issues since 2005. He is Polish, but grew up in the UK, and lives in Brussels. He has also written for The Guardian, The Times of London, and Intelligence Online.