The Bestepe Gendarmerie General Command trial (Turkish: Beştepe Jandarma Genel Komutanlığı davası) is one of the trials related to the 2016 Turkish coup attempt. It was among the largest mass trials opened after 15 July, beginning with an indictment against 244 people. The first hearing was held on 7 November 2017 at the Ankara 23rd Heavy Criminal Court, and the case was concluded on 26 June 2020.
First-instance judgment The first-instance court delivered judgments for 235 defendants, excluding those whose files had been severed. Of these, 86 military defendants were sentenced to aggravated life imprisonment for attempting to overthrow the constitutional order. The court imposed life imprisonment on a further 35 defendants. More than 100 defendants were convicted of offences including aiding the coup attempt and membership of an armed terrorist organisation, receiving fixed-term prison sentences ranging from 6 years and 3 months to 25 years.
The court also held 15 defendants, described in the judgment as the “leadership cadre”, responsible for the deaths of eight civilians who died near the headquarters that night. In addition to their coup-related convictions, each of those 15 defendants received eight further terms of aggravated life imprisonment. According to ballistic evidence cited by the court, the bullet fragments recovered from the victims’ bodies did not match the weapons used by headquarters personnel. The court found that the actual perpetrators could not be definitively identified and that the deaths had been caused largely by fire from aircraft, helicopters, and armoured vehicles. On that basis, the court treated the 15 defendants as joint perpetrators, while acquitting the remaining 114 defendants on the homicide charges.
Appeal Following the first-instance judgment, the 19th Criminal Chamber of the Ankara Regional Court of Appeal reviewed the case and on 17 December 2021 largely dismissed the appeals, upholding the first-instance judgment as lawful.
Court of Cassation’s reversal The 3rd Criminal Chamber of the Court of Cassation, by its decision of 19 February 2025, found the first-instance acquittals of 114 defendants to be erroneous and quashed those rulings.It held that persons present at the headquarters could be held liable as joint perpetrators for all consequences of the events, regardless of whether they had personally used weapons or whether the bullets recovered from the victims had been fired from their own weapons.
As a result, the 114 defendants who had previously been acquitted of the homicide charges were referred back for retrial, again facing the possibility of eight consecutive terms of aggravated life imprisonment for the deaths of the eight civilians. Defence lawyers argued that the ruling effectively extended liability for deaths whose immediate perpetrators could not be identified to nearly all personnel who had been present at the headquarters.
Retrial Following the Court of Cassation’s ruling, the case was reopened at the Ankara 23rd Heavy Criminal Court and proceedings began anew on 8 June 2026 in a large courtroom within the Sincan Prison Campus.
At the first hearing, the presiding judge ordered the Court of Cassation ruling to be read aloud before all absent defendants had arrived, and limited defence statements to 45 minutes per person. Approximately 140 defendants were present in the courtroom, with around 100 security personnel on duty. Some defendants had been transferred from other cities and stated that during transfer they had been deprived of sleep, access to water, and the opportunity to consult with their lawyers. During the hearing, the court did not permit defendants to meet with their lawyers, and shield-bearing gendarmerie personnel were positioned between defendants and their counsel. The defence lawyers filed a motion to recuse the presiding judge on those grounds, but the panel rejected the motion.
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