Turkey’s Constitutional Court (AYM), the highest legal authority in the country, made a unanimous decision on June 18, ruling that the lower courts’ verdict — convicting retired and serving military officers of plotting a coup to bring down the pro-Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) government in 2003 under a plan code-named "Sledgehammer" — had violated their right to fair trial. Since this landmark decision, all 237 officers behind bars in relation to the Sledgehammer case have been released.
This case started in January 2010, when an unidentified person delivered a suitcase containing 6,000 confidential documents somehow taken from the 1st Army Command to journalist Mehmet Baransu of Taraf, a Turkish daily that has taken a sharp critical stance against the military since the paper's founding in 2007. The newspaper immediately published the story, which alleged that there were plans to blow up at least two major mosques during Friday prayers; assassinate some Christian and Jewish leaders; and shoot down a Turkish warplane and blame it on Greece, Turkey’s historic rival. Taraf reported that the conspirators hoped the chaos would lead to calls for a military takeover and planned to turn stadiums into open-air prisons capable of holding tens of thousands detainees. The paper turned all these documents over to the state prosecutor in Istanbul, forming the foundation of the Sledgehammer case.
