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Hisham Aljundi
Doha
THE Ambassador of Turkey to Qatar HE Fikret Ozer on Sunday said that the honourable position of the Qatari government and its people during the failed coup attempt in 2016 will always be remembered by the Turkish people.
Addressing a press conference on the occasion of the commemoration of the failed coup d'`tat attempt, which took place on July 15, 2016, Ozer said that Qatar was the first country to declare its support to the legitimate government in Turkey against the failed attempt to overthrow democracy."We praise the stand of HH Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al Thani who showed all wisdom in that critical situation."
Drawing a parallel between the failed coup attempt in Turkey and the conspiracy against Qatar last year, he remarked,"I think what June 5 stands for Qatari people, July 15 does for the Turkish, as the two nations faced the same challenges on these two dates."
He valued the wise vision of the leadership in Qatar when they took the decision to establish a Turkish military base in Qatar aiming for the security of the region and not against a specific country."According to some American reports and what was proven later through investigations, there were intentions to deploy some forces to capture the Hamad International Airport and marine port at the outset of the blockade against Qatar, but the existence of the Turkish military base prevented that from happening," he stated.
Ozer said that the two years of investigations and judicial process on the events have produced countless crucial evidence."Fetullah G'fclen, leader of FET'd6, was the mastermind behind what happened in Turkey on July 15," Ozer said. And he assured that Gulen and his organisation were behind the failed coup attempt which took the lives of 251 innocent civilians and wounded thousands.
He revealed that the most recent findings illustrate that even on the night of July 15, 2016, plotters were in direct communication with the FET'd6 leadership.
According to Ozer, the coup attempt had failed owing to the efforts of the patriotic Turkish people.
Commenting on Fetullah Gulen's organisation, Ozer said:"It all started under the guise of a charitable education effort. I would like to emphasise this aspect because that is exactly what this organisation is up to in many countries."
"Unfortunately, we could not decipher their darker underbelly before. They disguised themselves as a benign education movement, when they started the campaign of establishing schools in Turkey and later around the world. But, we now understand that this was the first step of an infiltration campaign where children and their parents were recruited with the seemingly innocent promise of a better education and a good job," he added.
Ozer said that situation is stable now in Turkey and the failed coup attempt gave them a chance to cleanse 80 percent of all the governmental bodies of members of the latter organisation. He, however, did not rule out any threats.
