Four More Top Officers Held for Turkish 'Coup Plot'

A Turkish court ordered a general, an admiral and two colonels held in custody for an alleged coup plot which has already seen dozens of top officers jailed, Anatolia news agency said Saturday.

It said the four serving officers are suspected of involvement in the plot dubbed Operation Sledgehammer against the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

More than 200 active or reserve officers of all three services, including some 10 percent of the country's generals and admirals, are being prosecuted for the plot which the defendants say is a fiction to discredit the once-powerful military.

The ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), a liberal offshoot of a banned Islamist movement, says the plan was hatched shortly after it took power in 2002.

Prosecutors say the plotters planned to bomb mosques and down a Turkish jet over the Aegean and blame it on Greece, hoping to discredit the government and garner public support for a coup.

The alleged plot leader, retired general Cetin Dogan, has said that papers from a seminar on a contingency plan based on a scenario of tensions between Turkey and Greece, coupled with domestic unrest, had been doctored to look like a coup plan.

NATO member Turkey's entire top military command resigned at the end of July in protest over the government's treatment of jailed officers.

Since 1960, the military, which views itself as the defender of secularism in the country, has ousted four Turkish governments, including that of Erdogan's mentor Necmettin Erbakan in 1997.

Efforts to clip the military's wings began as Turkey opened discussions to join the European Union and tried to reduce the military's role to bring it in line with its European equivalents.

The move initially won public support but criticism has been growing recently on the motives for the investigation and the fact that no successful prosecutions have been brought.