"He has ties to FETÖ" claim

Unfounded

Claim

Alparslan Kuytul has ties to FETÖ/PDY; because he is connected to the organization, proceedings should be brought against him.

Claimed by: A BİMER tip-off dated 20 July 2016; and the news sites and social media accounts that repeated the same claim after the 30 January 2018 operation20 July 2016

Fact

This claim was officially investigated long before the 30 January 2018 operation. When a BİMER tip-off dated 20 July 2016 presented Alparslan Kuytul as connected to FETÖ, the party that tested the claim was not the Furkan Foundation but the police themselves. The investigation was completed in 2016–2017 and its result was recorded in two documents.

The first of these is the letter of the Adana Provincial Police Directorate dated 15 March 2017, sent to the Adana Chief Public Prosecutor's Office. The result of the query carried out by the KOM Branch Directorate with the data obtained from the FETÖ/PDY investigations is listed item by item:

No record in ByLock, the organization's closed communication application.
No membership in the associations closed down by decree having the force of law.
No account activity at the Bank Asya branches in Adana from 1 January 2014 until the bank's closure.
No stay at hotels known to be used by members of the organization.
No contact in the telephone records (HTS) of the suspects against whom proceedings were taken.

The letter reaches a one-sentence conclusion about Kuytul and the Furkan Foundation: no information or document could be obtained showing that he has any involvement, contact or connection with FETÖ/PDY.

The second document is the investigation report of the Tip-off Assessment Commission of the Antalya TEM Branch Directorate. According to the report, the search in the FETÖ/PDY query module was made under seven headings; on the page available to us five of them can be read together with their results, and beneath each one stands the same phrase: No record was found under this heading.

In short, what answers the claim is not a body defending itself; it is the state's own records. Nothing came up in those records.

This claim was voiced again on 7 September 2026 on the CNN Türk program "Tarafsız Bölge". The collective response to the accusations listed in the program: Cübbeli Ahmet's claims about the Furkan Movement on CNN Türk — the Furkan Movement's full statement text.

From tip-off to document

The process began not with an accusation but with a tip-off. The BİMER tip-off dated 20 July 2016 and numbered 820856 presented the Furkan Foundation and Alparslan Kuytul as connected to FETÖ. In line with the instruction of the Antalya Chief Public Prosecutor's Office, the tip-off went to the Tip-off Assessment Commission of the Antalya TEM Branch Directorate.

The commission began by identifying the person named in the tip-off. The tip-off said "foundation president Abdullah Kuytul"; when compared with the population registry records it was established that the person meant was Alparslan Kuytul, and he was entered into the report together with his place of birth, year of birth and address of residence. That is, the informant did not know the name of the person they were presenting as connected to FETÖ.

The query headings, the same result under each

The commission searched for Kuytul item by item in the FETÖ/PDY query module. The report states that the search was made under seven headings; on the page available to us five of them can be read together with the one-line result beneath them:

The table of persons named in the investigations conducted by the KOM Department and its subordinate units — no record was found.
The Bank Asya account activity list — no record was found.
The list of persons against whom proceedings were taken after the 15 July coup attempt — no record was found.
The records of associations and trade unions assessed within the scope of FETÖ/PDY — no record was found.
The SGK records of those working at companies named in the KOM investigations — no record was found.

Why is the Bank Asya query meaningful?

One of the items on the list says more on its own than the others. The report also states why this query was made: a telephone conversation of Fethullah Gülen dated 25 December 2013 was published in the national media on 15 January 2014 and was reflected to the public as the instruction "deposit money in Bank Asya". Thereupon a list was drawn up of the persons whose money in the bank increased or who opened a new account between 31 December 2013 and 24 December 2014.

This list is one of the criteria most frequently resorted to in the FETÖ case files, because putting money into one's account after the date the instruction was published was counted as having answered the organization. Kuytul is not on that list. The Adana Police letter dated 15 March 2017 confirms the same result by a second route: there is no account activity at all from 1 January 2014 until the bank's closure.

Why is the ByLock query particularly important?

One of the items in the Adana Police letter is ByLock as well: the program assessed to have been used by the organization for closed communication. In the greater part of the FETÖ case files this criterion was held to be decisive on its own, and in many files it was the sole ground for arrest. In the table at the bottom of the letter it is separately written next to Alparslan Kuytul's name that there is no record.

The remaining two criteria work by the same method. The HTS query looks for telephone contact with the suspects against whom proceedings were taken; the accommodation query looks for a record at hotels known to be used by persons affiliated with the organization. That is, the question asked is not "is this person from the organization" but "does his name appear in any one of the traces the organization left behind". Five separate traces were queried, and the name was found in none of them.

Note the sequence: the answer was written before the claim

When the dates are placed one under the other, no ground is left for the claim:

20 July 2016 — the tip-off is made.
8 February 2017 — the Adana Chief Public Prosecutor's Office asks the police to investigate whether Kuytul is affiliated with FETÖ/PDY.
15 March 2017 — the Adana Police report the result to the prosecutor's office: no record.
30 January 2018 — the operation is carried out, and this time the same claim goes into circulation in the media.

That is, the claim presented in 2018 as if it were a discovery had been searched for in the state's own records two years earlier and had not been found.

He had been opposing it for years anyway

Independently of the documents, the recordings are also plain to see. Kuytul's criticisms of the Gülen movement go back to the 1990s; the conference "The Essentials of Our Faith and Interfaith Dialogue" that he gave in Adana in 2005 is an open objection voiced in the period when the movement was at its strongest. This distinction is set out in detail under the heading the claim that he is on the same line.

Conclusion

The rating is "Unfounded", because the party saying the opposite of the claim is not the Furkan Foundation but the official units charged with investigating the claim. What we have is not a refuted claim but a tip-off that was never verified.

The claim about the institution is on a separate page: the "The Furkan Foundation is part of the FETÖ structure" claim. All the documents on this page belong to the 2016–2017 investigation and are included in the case file opened with the 30 January 2018 operation.