Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has explicitly linked the freedom of captive US missionary Andrew Brunson and the extradition from the US of the cleric Fethullah Gulen, blamed by Erdogan for an attempted coup in July 2016.
Speaking in a live interview on the NTV news channel on Saturday, Erdogan said 'the US is behind' Gulen, according to World Watch Monitor.
He continued: 'If you want Brunson, look at the steps you have taken in the past,' Erdoğan was quoted in a Sputnik News report as saying. 'Why don't you deport this man [Gülen] in accordance with the extradition treaty?'
He said in January that he would no longer facilitate US extradition requests until the US had extradited Gulen, which it has refused to do.
Brunson, 50, who has lived and worked in Izmir, Turkey, at the Evangelical Presbyterian church there, was arrested on October 16, 2016 and has since been accused of aiding the 'Fethullah Gülen Terrorist Organisation' (FETO). He has denied all the charges and his supporters – among them Donald Trump and his religious freedom envoy Sam Brownback – say they are fabricated.
By the end of last week, two-thirds of the US Senate had signed a bi-partisan letter to President Erdoğan, urging that 'justice would be done and Pastor Brunson would be reunited with his family', says World Watch Monitor.
'We are deeply disturbed that the Turkish government has gone beyond legitimate action against the [FETO] coup plotters to undermine Turkey's own rule of law and democratic traditions,' the letter said.
The 66 senators described the indictment read out in court against Brunson as 'an absurd collection of anonymous accusations, flights of fantasy and random character assassination. It is an insult not only to an unjustly imprisoned individual, but to the traditions of Turkish jurisprudence.'
Undeterred, Erdogan said: 'If you are not giving [Gulen] to us, then excuse us, but from now on, whenever you ask for another terrorist, as long as I am I office, you will not get them.'
