Turkey sacks 10,000 more civil servants, shuts media in latest crackdown
Source: Reuters
Turkey said it had dismissed a further 10,000 civil servants and closed 15 more media outlets over suspected links with terrorist organizations and U.S.-based cleric Fethullah Gulen, blamed by Ankara for orchestrating a failed coup in July.
More than 100,000 people had already been sacked or suspended and 37,000 arrested since the failed coup, in an unprecedented crackdown the government says is necessary to root out all supporters of Gulen from the state apparatus.
Thousands more academics, teachers, health workers, prison guards and forensics experts were among the latest to be removed from their posts through two new executive decrees published on the Official Gazette late on Saturday.
Opposition parties described the move as a coup in itself. The continued crackdown has also raised concerns over the functioning of state.
"What the government and Erdogan are doing right now is a direct coup against the rule of law and democracy," Sezgin Tanrikulu, an MP from the main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP), said in a Periscope broadcast posted on Twitter.
Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-turkey-security-dismissals-idUSKBN12U04L
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"I believe this issue will come to the parliament," he said, and repeated that he would approve it, a move that would sink Turkey's hopes of European Union membership. Erdogan shrugged off such concerns, saying that much of the world had capital punishment.
