Turkish police announced Tuesday they had arrested the wife of an alleged co-conspirator in the 2016 assassination of Russia's ambassador in Ankara. Ayse Sogut was detained earlier in connection with the killing of Andrei Karlov and then ordered to remain under house arrest only to disappear. She was subsequently sentenced by a Turkish court to nine years in prison, the pro-government Daily Sabah reported without providing any details of her role in the affair. A court upheld two separate lifetime sentences for her husband Sahin Sogut in June for relaying orders for the hit job.
Turkey said the murder of Andrei Karlov at an art exhibition by off-duty police officer Mert Altuntas was carried out under orders from the Pennsylvania-based Sunni cleric Fethullah Gulen to disrupt warming relations between the Kremlin and Ankara. Relations between the regional foes nosedived in 2015 after Turkey shot down a Russian air force jet over Syria, where the two countries back opposing sides in the conflict. Ankara blamed Gulenist officers for that incident as well.
A onetime ally of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Gulen was accused of masterminding a failed coup to bloodily overthrow him in July 2016. Russian President Vladimir Putin was among the first world leaders to reach out to Erdogan and declare his support after the attempted putsch, marking the beginning of their bumpy bromance.
However, Gulen and his disciples deny that Altuntas killed Karlov at the imam's bidding. And as Al-Monitor reported at the time, Russian analysts scoffed at the “mad Gulenist” theory, viewing it more as a ploy to get Russia on board with Ankara’s ongoing campaign to shut down Gulenists networks across the globe. Prior to the murder, Russia had already shuttered 150 Gulen-linked schools in the country.
