Three posts published on September 14, 2026 allege that Turkish authorities have frozen the pension payments and bank accounts of Alparslan Kuytul, an arrested religious leader, and of several of his arrested followers.
Specific property rights claims:
Kuytul’s retirement pension — described as earned through decades of work — has been placed under a financial block (bloke), meaning he cannot access it while under arrest (without conviction yet).
At least two followers’ spouses posting under the hashtag #AlparslanHocaMaaşınaBloke make the same claim about their husbands: civil servants and workers whose bank accounts were frozen upon arrest despite no conviction.
Kuytul’s daughter Meryem K. Uytul (Image 3, 277.9K views) makes the most detailed legal argument, citing three specific Turkish laws she claims the freezes violate: Law No. 5510 Art. 93 (which she says explicitly prohibits seizure of pension payments, with narrow exceptions for alimony and SGK debts); CMK Art. 128 (which she argues limits asset seizure to proceeds of crime, which a pension is not); and TCK Art. 20 (which establishes that criminal penalties are personal and cannot extend to family members).
She further argues the freezes harm five dependent children who relied on their grandfather’s pension as the family’s sole income, invoking the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
The central property rights argument running across all three posts is that a pension, as a legally earned entitlement, is legally protected from confiscation under Turkish law regardless of criminal proceedings, and that freezing it before any conviction punishes innocent family dependants rather than the accused.
For a decade, thousands of Gülen movement members have reportedly suffered the same practice — the confiscation of pension payments used as a tool of repression and property rights violation. If the allegations made by Kuytul’s family and followers prove accurate, it would suggest the Turkish government continues to reach for the same instrument to silence dissent, regardless of which opposition group is in its sights.
