Turkey’s prime minister, Binali Yıldırım, has declared an attempted coup by a military faction to be over, calling it a “black stain” on the country’s democracy and pledging harsh punishment for those involved.

After a night of chaos and bloodshed, Yıldırım said the government would consider reintroducing the death penalty, which would allow it to execute those behind the coup, the country’s fifth in 60 years. He said that the authorities had detained nearly 3,000 military personnel including high-ranking officers and praised the role played by civilians, the police and the security services in facing down the military.

As dawn broke in Turkey on Saturday, confrontations were continuing in some parts of the country. But Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, had been able to re-emerge from a retreat on the coast of the Aegean sea and fly to Istanbul, where he was greeted by crowds of supporters who overran the airport despite troops having tried to seal it off.

By Saturday lunchtime, the death toll stood at 161, with more than 1,440 injured. An earlier statement by the acting chairman of the joint chiefs of staff said that 47 of the dead were civilians.

Erdoğan’s appearance helped to calm fears that Turkey – a major player in Middle Eastern politics – was about to further destabilise the region.

“Turkey has a democratically elected government and president,” Erdoğan said after landing. “We are in charge and we will continue exercising our powers until the end. We will not abandon our country to these invaders. It will end well.”



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In the live TV address, Erdoğan said the uprising was an act of treason and that those responsible would pay a “heavy price”.

Bolstering the president’s claim, crowds of Turks defied a military curfew and gathered to oppose the coup, swarming around military vehicles and, in some cases, lying down in front of them. A series of opposition leaders who were normally critical of Erdoğan’s increasingly autocratic ways also issued supportive statements. A leading pro-Kurdish party, the People’s Democratic party (HDP), said: “The only solution is democratic politics.”

As the fightback gathered steam, Yıldırım said at least 336 rebel officers had been captured by loyalist forces and he promised to shoot down any military planes in the control of the coup’s supporters.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest President Erdoğan surrounded by security and supporters as he arrives at Atatürk airport in Istanbul. Photograph: Huseyin Aldemir/Reuters

Ümit Dündar, a loyalist who was appointed overnight as the acting chairman of the joint chiefs of staff after the alleged kidnapping of his predecessor by coup forces, said on Saturday that the coup had failed.

In a reference to Turkey’s four coup attempts in recent decades, Dündar said the army had “irreversibly closed the chapter of military coups”.



“The people have taken to the streets and voiced their support for democracy,” he said. “Turkey displayed a historic cooperation between the government and the people. The nation will never forget this betrayal. Turkey has irreversibly closed the chapter of military coups.”

He said 104 coup plotters were killed during security operations.

“The armed forces is determined to remove members of the Gülen movement from its ranks,” he said. “We will continue to serve the people. I would like to thank all political parties and the media for their support for democracy. Those who betrayed their country will not go unpunished.”

Footage showed police officers arresting soldiers who had taken over Istanbul’s central square on Friday night and rounding up army officials who seized a television channel.

Istanbul’s two airports, shut on Friday night by the coup’s supporters, reopened at 6am and a bridge spanning the city’s Asian and European sides was reopened less than an hour later. Soldiers were shown on television walking off the Bosphorus Bridge en masse, their arms raised in surrender.

Some coup leaders remained defiant on Saturday morning. Officers calling themselves the Peace at Home movement said in an email, which was sent from a Turkish military address, that they were determined to fight on and urged people to stay indoors for safety.

But at lunchtime, Yıldırım gave a press conference with the new acting chief of the army, declaring that the coup was over. He described the plotters as terrorists, their actions as treason, and said those who had turned their guns on civilians were worse than the Kurdish PKK. The authorities had detained 2,839 military personnel, including high-ranking officers, he said.

Yıldırım said 15 July would become a day to celebrate democracy and called on citizens to demonstrate on Saturday evening in town squares, filling public spaces with the Turkish flag.



Although the government appeared to have largely restored control, isolated reports of unrest continued. At Gölcük naval base, a frigate was reportedly taken over by an unidentified anti-government group and the head of the Turkish fleet was held hostage, a Greek military source told Reuters.

Eight men landed in a Turkish military helicopter at the Greek city of Alexandroupolis and attempted to claim political asylum, a Greek police report said. The men had reportedly removed all insignias from their uniform, making it impossible to know their ranks. The Turkish foreign minister tweeted a demand for the return of the “traitors”.

The coup leaders launched a series of attacks on the parliament in Ankara on Friday night and fired tank missiles at pro-government protesters in the streets outside. The military faction released a statement saying it had taken power to protect Turkey’s secular traditions against Erdoğan’s Islamist-leaning government.

Tanks appeared in the streets and some news channels were closed down. Gruesome footage that was broadcast showed corpses dismembered and blown apart by tank ordnance; the parliament was left with charred walls and smashed windows.

For more than two hours, Erdoğan was nowhere to be seen and could only make an eventual statement to broadcasters via FaceTime.

His re-emergence in Istanbul will have calmed many world leaders. Turkey’s current government is a key player – and previously a rare beacon of relative stability – in the troubled Middle East. A Nato member, Turkey hosts US military bases and is a major backer of rebel factions in the Syrian civil war, as well as a key partner in Europe’s attempt to stop migration flows to Europe.

The US president, Barack Obama, urged all parties in Turkey to back the “democratically elected” government, a clear denunciation of the attempted coup.

In a similarly supportive statement, the EU’s three top officials – Jean-Claude Juncker, Federica Mogherini and Donald Tusk – said: “Turkey is a key partner for the European Union. The EU fully supports the democratically elected government, the institutions of the country and the rule of law. We call for a swift return to Turkey’s constitutional order.”

The presidency later claimed the coup attempt had been mounted by a Gülenist faction within the army, referring to the dissident group headed by the exiled Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen. Gülen denied being involved and condemned the attempted coup “in the strongest terms”.

“As someone who suffered under multiple military coups during the past five decades, it is especially insulting to be accused of having any link to such an attempt. I categorically deny such accusations,” Gülen said in a brief statement.

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“Government should be won through a process of free and fair elections, not force. I pray to God for Turkey, for Turkish citizens, and for all those currently in Turkey that this situation is resolved peacefully and quickly.”

Turkey’s most recent coup occurred in 1997, while one of the most brutal was in 1980. Erdoğan’s government was believed to be in a stronger position than most previous civilian administrations, shoring up his position during a decade of economic success. He placed sympathisers and loyalists in key parts of the state apparatus and increasingly cracked down on suspected plotters.

But recent events in Turkey and across the Middle East have destabilised the country, with Kurdish rebels staging a new insurgency in the south-east of the country. The Syrian civil war, raging across Turkey’s southern border, has spilt over into Turkey, with Islamic State mounting a series of terrorist attacks across the country in the past year, killing hundreds.

Erdoğan’s government has been perceived by liberal wings of Turkish society to be infringing on the secular traditions established by the father of the modern Turkish state, Kemal Ataturk.