Claims of the plot first surfaced in the liberal Taraf newspaper, which was passed documents detailing plans to bomb two Istanbul mosques and accuse Greece of shooting down a Turkish aircraft over the Aegean Sea.
On 19 June 2014 all the accused were ordered released from prison, pending a retrial, after a finding by the Constitutional Court that their rights had been violated.
[8] The timing of the decision fuelled further accusations regarding the involvement of the Cemaat movement initially, since by 2014 the AKP and Gülen had fallen out with each other.
Furthermore, the then-AKP Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan openly accused the Cemaat movement of infiltrating the judiciary following a government corruption scandal, beginning a large-scale operation of either removing or relocating judicial and law enforcement employees.
Journalist Mehmet Baransu said he had been passed documents detailing plans to bomb two Istanbul mosques and accuse Greece of shooting down a Turkish plane over the Aegean Sea.
The new evidence consists of written documents, video files and digital material on a flash disk, and includes plans to be put into action if the coup attempt were to fail.
It charged 28 defendants, 15 of them in pre-trial detention in connection with documents found at the home of Colonel Hakan Büyük's son with "the attempt to remove the government of the Turkish Republic" and demanded sentences between 15 and 20 years' imprisonment.
"It has become impossible for me to continue in this high office, because I am unable to fulfil my responsibility to protect the rights of my personnel as the chief of general staff," Koşaner said.
[3] Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan accepted the resignations and appointed Necdet Özel as the chief of the armed forces.
The decision stamped the civilian authority on the country's military, which has long regarded itself as a protector of Turkey's secular traditions.
[26] In mid-November 2011 a third 264-page indictment was sent to Istanbul Heavy Penal Court 10, accusing 143 suspects, 66 of them in pre-trial detention with an attempt to overthrow the government.
[28] Reminding that the Turkish Armed Forces repeatedly informed on the seminars in question and the expert opinion the prosecutor's office had demanded it was hard to understand why the court had ordered the continuation of pre-trial detention.
[29] US Ambassador to Ankara Francis J. Ricciardone stated that a transparent trial was expected and he tried to understand, how freedom of press could be discussed, when journalists were being arrested.
[31] Dani Rodrik[32] and Pinar Doğan,[33] son-in-law and daughter of chief suspect Çetin Doğan, stated, "what lies behind the trials is an apparent effort to discredit the government’s opponents on the basis of the flimsiest evidence and often, far worse, by framing them with planted evidence and forged documents" in their personal blog page.
[34] Against this Fevzi Bilgin, Assistant Professor of Political Science, St. Mary's College of Maryland held, "Mr. Rodnik’s interpretation and presentation of the case is neither unbiased nor genuinely informational.
"[35][36] On 16 January 2013 Mr. Orhan Aykut confessed to the Aydınlık newspaper that together with Mr. İhsan Arslan (AKP deputy at the time) they received a suitcase of real Balyoz Seminar documents from Mr. Iskender Pala (who was expelled from the Turkish Navy for not being secular) at Movenpick Hotel in Istanbul in 2007 and using these documents they had created fake evidences with a group of specialists in Ankara to be used in Balyoz Case.
The European Association of Lawyers for Democracy & World Human Rights said their intervention was legal and approved by the Presiding Judge at the time.