ISTANBUL  - Thousands of people protested Thursday outside a Turkish prison complex where the mass trial of almost 300 people accused of plotting to overthrow the Islamist-rooted government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan entered its closing stages.
Police used tear gas to prevent large crowds from bursting into the heavily-guarded Silivri compound near Istanbul where 275 defendants including former military chief Ilker Basbug have been on trial for four years in the so-called Ergenekon case. "We are the soldiers of Ataturk!" the protesters chanted, referring to the founder of secular Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, whose legacy has been fiercely defended by the staunchly secular army in the Nato member state.
The defendants face dozens of charges, ranging from membership of an underground "terrorist organisation" dubbed Ergenekon, arson, illegal possession of weapons and instigating an armed uprising against Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party, which came to power in 2002.
The defendants in the case - seen as a key test in Erdogan's showdown with secularist and military opponents - include Basbug and other army officers as well as lawyers, academics and journalists. "Today they label everybody a coup maker... they will continue until no patriots are left here," said Emine Ulker Tarhan, a lawmaker from the main opposition Republic People's Party (CHP) lawmaker. Inside the courtroom, arguments between lawyers and the judge over procedure forced lengthy delays throughout the day although the hearing was expected to include the final summing up from the state prosecutor.
One defence lawyer was thrown out for saying: "The defence wants its right to speak!"
The 2,455-page indictment accuses members of Ergenekon - an alleged shadowy network of ultranationalists trying to seize control in Turkey - of a string of attacks and political violence over several decades. They include a shooting at Turkey's top administrative court in 2006 which killed a judge and which the state prosecutor believes was instigated by a retired general, and a grenade attack against the opposition Cumhuriyet newspaper's Istanbul headquarters the same year blamed on the then army command. Prosecutors believe Ergenekon, named after a mythical place in central Asia believed to be the homeland of Turks, is made up of loosely connected branches with an eventual goal of toppling the AKP government and restructuring Turkey on a nationalist footing. In a separate case dubbed "Sledgehammer", more than 300 hundred active and retired army officers, including three former generals, received prison sentences of up to 20 years in September over a 2003 military exercise which the same Silivri said was an undercover coup plot.
Lawyers for plaintiffs in several other criminal cases, including the murder of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink in 2007, also asked for them to be consolidated with Ergenekon.
Pro-government circles have praised the Ergenekon trial as a step towards democracy in Turkey, where the army violently overthrew three governments in 1960, 1971 and 1980.
In 1997, it pressured the then Islamic-leaning prime minister Necmettin Erbakan, the political mentor of the current premier, into stepping down in what was popularly dubbed a "post-modern coup" strategy.
However critics have branded the trial a witch-hunt to silence the opposition. It is one of a series of cases in which members of the Turkish army, the second biggest in Nato, have faced prosecution for alleged coup plots against an elected government.