Turkish
Authorities jailed a Turkish Televangelist and 150 of his followers
pending trial on Thursday, police said, on charges including sexual
abuse of children, blackmail and forming a criminal gang.
Adnan
Oktar, an Islamic preacher and a prolific writer on creationism, ran
his own television channel where he hosted talk shows on religious
values that featured a bevy of heavily made-up women in tight clothing,
dubbed “kittens’’.
He was sometimes shown dancing with the women and singing with young men, his “lions’’.
The police financial crimes unit detained 187 people last week in raids across five provinces targeting Oktar and his followers.
Oktar
denied the charges against him, saying he lived by the law and was not a
gang leader, according to his testimony to police obtained by Anadolu.
He
was captured in his car, moments after having fled his villa in
Cengelkoy on the Asian side of Istanbul, local media has reported.
The
Istanbul prosecutor’s office has labeled Oktar’s group a criminal gang
and said it aimed to commit crimes including sexual abuse of children,
sexual assault, money laundering, depriving people of their freedom,
fraud, bribery and torture, state-run Anadolu said.
The preacher began forming groups of followers in the late 1970s and has frequently run afoul of Turkish authorities.
He has faced a number of trials, including on previous charges of forming a criminal gang, but was acquitted.
The
broadcasting regulator suspended one of his programs in February,
saying its blend of theological discussion and dancing violated gender
equality and women’s rights.
Oktar,
who argues that Darwin’s theory of evolution is the root of global
terrorism, has previously accused British intelligence of requesting the
Turkish authorities to take action against him.
According to his website, Oktar has written more than 300 books, translated into 73 languages.
Under
his pen-name Harun Yahya, he gave secularist France a scare in 2007 by
mass-mailing thousands of free copies of his “Atlas of Creation’’ to
schools and libraries across the country.
The
Education Ministry ordered school headmasters to seize and remove
copies of the glossy book, which argues that all living things were
created by God exactly as they are formed today.
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