The leader of a small Turkish nationalist party and the editor of a left-leaning newspaper have been detained in a probe into a shadowy ultra-nationalist gang, Reuters reported quoting Turkish media on Friday.
Thirty-nine people have already been charged in the police investigation into the far-right group, known as Ergenekon, over allegations that it sought to engineer a coup against the country's Islamist-rooted government in 2009. Turkish police told Reuters 12 people in total had been detained in the latest swoop.
The CNN Turk website said among those detained were Dogu Perincek, head of the nationalist, left-wing Workers' Party, former rector of Istanbul University Kemal Alemdaroglu and Ilhan Selçuk, editor of the left-leaning and pro-establishment Cumhuriyet newspaper.
Cumhuriyet is Turkey's oldest newspaper and has carried out an unrelenting campaign against the government, accusing it of watering down strict secular laws.
The Ergenekon gang was suspected of being behind a series of bombings on the Cumhuriyet newspaper offices carried out last year, Turkish media have said previously. Newspapers have said the group had been plotting a series of bomb attacks and assassinations and were behind the killing of Turkish Armenian journalist Hrant Dink.
Analysts say the gang is part of a shadowy "deep state", code for hardline nationalists in Turkey's security forces and state bureaucracy ready to take the law into their own hands for the sake of their ideological agenda.
Police operations against the Ergenekon group began in January with the arrest of a retired army general, a number of nationalist lawyers and members of underworld crime groups, Deutsche Presse-Agentur (DPA) reported. The group represents a strain of extreme nationalism in Turkey—it is also staunchly secularist and opposed to the mildly Islamist government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
