Police officers escort Adnan Oktar after his arrest in Istanbul in 2018.
Source: AFP / Getty Images
A Turkish Islamic televangelist was sentenced to 1,075 years in prison on Monday for running a sect of decades whose members have been charged with crimes ranging from sexual assault to blackmail, money laundering and even espionage.
Adnan Oktar, who wrote books on Islamic creationism under the pseudonym Harun Yahya, was put on trial in Istanbul alongside 236 other alleged members or facilitators of his network, state agency Anadolu reported.
He has become known in Turkey over the years, especially for the provocative TV shows broadcast on his own channel. On the screen, the sect leader surrounded himself with young women he called “kittens”, who often wore revealing clothes while he expressed opinions on religious and political issues.
Oktar, 64, and hundreds of his followers were arrested in 2018 and his TV channel was shut down.
Her “Creation Atlas” – which argues against evolution, saying that all life was created by God in a “perfect” form – was seen last year on a shelf behind European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde, while she was speaking at an online pandemic summit.
Thousands of free copies of the book have been sent to politicians, journalists and schools around the world. Lagarde had never read the book, said a person familiar with the matter.