DIYARBAKIR-- Abdulrehim Aydin has little doubt about who really was behind the assassination of the two police officers in Ceylanpinar in July last year which triggered the lengthy clashes that followed between Kurdish guerrillas and government forces.
"It was the work of the cemaat," Aydin says referring to the seemingly influential Gulen Movement.
Aydin's younger brother Sedat has been in jail ever since waiting for a trial accused of the double murder which the media has widely blamed on elements within the Kurdistan Workers's Party (PKK).
"They found nothing in our home when they searched. When they took my brother and the others, no one was able to see them for four days," says Aydin who still has no information about what fate awaits his brother.
Aydin says the man who informed the police about Sedat, Toran Beskat and his two brothers, Remazan and Midhet, have been members of the cemaat.
"Remazan was arrested for being a cemaat and Midhet has been in hiding for the same charges," he says.
Aydin is far from the only person pointing at the powerful Gulen Movement, also called the parallel state, as the architect behind the last year's resumption of violence in Turkey's Kurdish southeast.
Earlier in July, Turkish Minister of Energy and Natural Resources, Berat Albayrak said the government had "convincing reasons" to believe that the Gulen Movement was behind the air attacks on civilians in the bordering village of Roboski that killed over 34 local people.
Albayrak, who is also the son-in-law of the Turkish President Receb Tayyip Erdogan, said the cemaat wanted to incite a Kurdish uprising.
As with most things in Turkish politics, it is apparently difficult to know with any certainty if these claims and counter claims have any real substance. But the seriousness of the accusations has forced the usually reclusive Fetullah Gulen under an unwanted spotlight as he reluctantly has been commenting the coup and rejecting the charges in a series of rare interviews.
Although the PKK officially denied involvement in the police murders less than a week after the incident, yet the statement on its Furat mouthpiece which ascribed the action to the PKK invited quick and firey response from Turkish jet fighters.
A judge and 29 police officers have now been arrested in Ceylanpinar as part of the crack down on Gulen activists in the Kurdish southeast.
The detained judge, Nouradin Bolot was leading the investigations on the two murdered policemen.
"Right from the start we suspected that international forces were involved in the assassinations," says lawyer Husen Akay who defends the prime suspect in the killing, Sedat Aydin.
"We suspected both MIT [Turkish Intelligence] and the Gulen people," Akay says.
He believes the MIT recruits are everywhere "but no one dares to point at them."
"Who knows, maybe the MIT have infiltrated the PKK and maybe some of them are Gulen activists too," Akay says.
For Abdulrehim Aydin however things will unlikely become as they were before. He says his family has endured the worst since his brother Sedat was arrested for the police murders.
"I was a journalist, but now they have withdrawn my work permit and sacked my other brother who worked at a Syrian refugee camp," Aydin says.
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