Claims About the Coronavirus and the Prayer Bans
The "Alparslan Kuytul Organised the Incident" Claim
Unfounded
Claim
Fact
The subject is the incident that took place in Adana on the night of 21 May 2020. The following day, in the news bulletin of 22 May 2020, the incident was reported with the phrase "the crowd that Kuytul too was at the head of", and it was said that the crowd had gathered "after a provocative message".
Kuytul was not there at the time of the incident. In his own words: "I was in another part of Adana. I was at another end of it. I was having an iftar meal with a few friends. I was not there." Nor did he know of the decision taken by the five or six people who went to the park; he says that he learned only that night that praying in the park had been banned.
He came to the scene after he heard that his friends had been beaten and taken into custody. The police station to which those taken into custody had been brought is close to his house; those who heard the news gathered in front of his house. He explains the reason for the gathering as follows:
"The reason for our gathering is not the tarawih prayer; it is that our friends were sworn at and that they were beaten and taken away to the police."
So the sequence the report sets up is the reverse. The crowd did not gather for the prayer and cause an incident; it gathered after the incident had occurred, because of the detentions.
Is this what an organised action looks like?
The group that started the incident is five or six people; at night, with their prayer mats, at the edge of a park. Kuytul's remark is short: "It is shown as though hundreds of people had done it, there is no such thing." And it is enough to look at the outcome: while the detentions went on until morning, not a single disturbance came from the crowd waiting in the street.
The claim is in fact two separate sentences
Two things are said in the report of 22 May 2020, and the answer to each is different:
- Alparslan Kuytul was at the head of the crowd.
- The crowd gathered upon a provocative message from him.
The first is a matter of place and time. The second is a matter of a document that has to be shown.
The first sentence: where was he at the time of the incident?
At the hour the incident began, Kuytul was at another end of Adana, at an iftar meal with a few friends. He says this without hesitation in the statement he made the following day, and he adds that he watched the report: "I watched it on ATV this evening. Apparently I too was among those performing that tarawih prayer... I am not there."
In the forum programme held on the night of 29 May 2020, those who witnessed the beginning of the incident say the same thing. The group that went to the park is a few friends from the neighbourhood; no one went upon an instruction or a call. In the programme the incident is reduced to a single sentence: there is no crowd gathered by a leader here, only an intervention against a situation in which five or six people wanted to pray.
The second sentence: which message?
The phrase "provocative message" appears in the report, but the message itself is shown nowhere. Its text is not published, its date is not given, nor is it said from which account it came. The existence of a call is claimed, while the proof of it is asked of the reader.
Kuytul's account shows the opposite: he learned that night that praying in the park had been banned. "By God, I did not know either that it was forbidden in the park", he says. It is not possible for the person organising an action not to know of the ban in the place where the action is to be carried out.
When did he come to the scene?
After he heard of the detentions. The sequence is clear in his statements: first came the news that two people had been taken, the number became eight or ten, and then, together with the relatives who came to the police station, it rose to 47. He came home because the police station to which those taken into custody had been brought was close to the house, and those who heard the news gathered in front of his house.
Nor does he conceal the reason for waiting there: he suspected that the custody procedures would be drawn out deliberately and that his friends would be kept at the police throughout the religious holiday. The wait was not a demonstration; it was keeping track of the matter.
The easiest test: what happened that night?
The intention of a person who gathers a crowd for a provocation is understood from the behaviour of the crowd. That night people waited in the street until nine in the morning, and not a single disturbance occurred. Kuytul's question is this:
"If we had come for a provocation, would there not have had to be very bad incidents in front of the house that night?"
What does the report's own footage show?
The footage of a crowd praying that appears on screen in the same report is not the tarawih but the morning prayer of the following day. Those who were waiting while the detentions went on prayed in the road because the police blockade kept them from going to the mosque right beside them. Kuytul recounts this detail openly too: "How am I to take the 200-300 people there into my house? (...) We had no choice but to pray in the road, keeping to social distancing."
So the footage shown as proof of the sentence "the crowd he was at the head of" belongs not to the incident itself but to hours after the incident. Although there is about a metre and a half of distance between the rows in the footage, the same frame has also been used under the heading "a prayer at zero distance"; that heading is dealt with on a separate page.
The weakest point of a claim is the date of its own evidence. Here the date does not hold.
The incident itself is recounted on a separate page: The Claim That They Staged a Prayer Provocation in Adana. For the claim about the place, see The "They Held a Secret Tarawih Prayer in the Mosque" Claim.