ISTANBUL (AFP) — Eleven people were charged by an Istanbul court Sunday in connection with an alleged plot to overthrow Turkey's Islamist-rooted conservative government and held in custody.
They formed part of a group of 33 people detained Wednesday in a nationwide swoop as part of an investigation into the "Ergenekon" network, suspected of laying the groundwork for a putsch to overthrow the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Thirteen other people held in the operation Wednesday were released. Among them were two retired four star generals and a former senior official in the national security council.
A total of 15 people have now been charged, four of them -- all army officers -- on Saturday.
The rest are still being questioned.
Among those charged and detained Sunday was former police chief Ibrahim Sahin, who was the centre of a corruption controversy in the 1990s, the Anatolia news agency said.
Erdogan Sunday called on the secularist opposition, which suspects the government of seeking to muzzle criticism and discredit the armed forces, to let investigators do their work.
"There are in this country magistrates and prosecutors who have a free conscience," he said.
"Nobody should think themselves above justice," he told a meeting of his ruling AK party.
He called on politicians to stay out of legal matters, saying that Turkish democracy would emerge strengthened from the investigation.
Police Friday unearthed in a forest in a suburb of Istanbul two light anti-tank weapons, 10 hand grenades, bullets and explosives after anti-terrorist police using metal detectors and sniffer dogs dug up the area on the basis of documents seized from Sahin.
They were shown Sunday to reporters but it was not clear whether they were intended for a coup or dated back to the period when Sahin was implicated in a murky scandal involving civil and military intelligence and the criminal underworld.
Further digging in other places found nothing.
In October, 86 people -- retired army officers, politicians, journalists and underworld figures -- went on trial, accused of belonging to a terrorist organisation and of plotting to topple the AKP government.
The probe initially received support for countering the so-called "deep state" -- a term used to describe security forces acting outside the law, often in collusion with the underworld, to protect what they see as Turkey's best interests.
But the probe's credibility has been increasingly questioned after it began targeting journalists, academics, intellectuals and retired generals, known as vocal government critics.
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