At around six in the morning on Wednesday 14 October, eight to ten police officers came to the home of a 33-year-old neurosurgeon in Nazilli, in Aydın province. He was taken away in front of his wife and his two young daughters. He was questioned by the prosecutor and remanded in custody the same day, to Nazilli E Type Prison.

He had four operations scheduled that day. One was a patient with a fractured spine. He told the officers that his patients were waiting, and asked to complete the operations and then surrender himself. The request was refused.

The doctor is identified in the reporting only by his initials. He completed his medical degree at Şifa University on a full scholarship, trained as a specialist at Dokuz Eylül University and worked there for six years. In June 2026 the state posted him to Nazilli State Hospital under the compulsory service required of newly qualified doctors. Within months he was among the hospital’s highest-volume surgeons, operating on patients referred from the surrounding districts and from Aydın itself, in procedures that ran eight and nine hours. The provincial health director had publicly praised his work. His professors wanted him back at the university when his compulsory service ended.

The state assigned him to that hospital in June. It arrested him four months later.

Two grounds are reported. The first is that about twelve years ago, as a medical student, he travelled to Van with a group of fellow students and distributed sacrificial meat to people in need. He would have been about twenty-one. Years later, his name appeared in statements given by others who had been on that trip.

The second is ByLock. According to the account, the allegation rests on no message content, and the actual use of the application is not accepted as established.

His request to be tried without detention was refused.

Ömer Faruk Gergerlioğlu, the DEM Party member of parliament who made the case public, published messages from the doctor’s father and wrote, tagging the Ministry of Justice: “While these absurdities are being done in this country, somebody has carried out a great robbery. Damn your justice.” Of the refused request he wrote: “He said, ‘at least let me operate on my patient with the broken back and then take me’ — and they did not listen.”

Şifa University, where the doctor studied, no longer exists. It was closed by emergency decree 667, published in the Official Gazette on 23 July 2016, one of fifteen foundation universities shut on that single day, with 56,703 students and 2,808 academics between them. The same decree, on the same day, dissolved YARSAV, the judges’ and prosecutors’ association whose president, Murat Arslan, was released from prison the day before this doctor’s case was reported, after serving ten years.

Ten years separate the conduct alleged against this surgeon from his arrest. In that time he finished medical school, completed six years of specialist training, qualified as a neurosurgeon, and was posted by the Ministry of Health to a hospital that needed him.

Four patients were on his list on 14 October. One of them had a broken back.