A court hearing on the alleged assassination attempt against President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan during last year's failed coup attempt started in Turkey's southwestern Muğla province. Prosecutors called for life sentences for 47 suspected.
Monday's hearing, which was held in Muğla Chamber of Commerce and Industry's conference hall due to the large number of suspects, began amid tight security
The "assassination team" accused of targeting Erdoğan was among 47 suspects appearing at the hearing. During the night of the coup attempt, two police officers were killed at the hotel were Erdoğan was vacationing in the port town of Marmaris.
Later that night, Erdoğan told on live television that he had narrowly escaped with his life when the hotel was bombed 15 minutes after he left the premises.
On Monday, prosecutors in Mugla charged 47 suspects, almost all of them soldiers, with charges including attempting to assassinate the president, breaching the constitution and membership of an armed terrorist organisation.
One of the first defendants to testify admitted to accepting a mission to seize, but not kill, Erdoğan.
"My mission was to take the president and bring him to Akıncı air base safe and sound," Gökhan Sönmezateş told the court, referring to a base outside Ankara that briefly functioned as a command centre for the coup plotters.
U.S.-based Islamic preacher Fethullah Gülen was one of the masterminds of failed coup attempt Turkey. Gülen, 73, had been a close ally of the then-Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, helping him to redesign and install his Islamic-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP) in power in 2002.
Sönmezateş, a former brigadier general, was described in the indictment as a leader of the mission, something he denied in court. He also denied charges that he was a member of Gülen's network.
"It was for the country, for the nation, to stop the decay domestically, to put an end to the bribery, to protect my country from the PKK," he told the court, referring to the militant Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).
