Turkish Trainee Pilot Sentenced to Life Over 2016 Coup: Family Cites Innocence
On July 15, 2016, officer cadet Alper Kalin was about to leave his base in Ankara for a friend's wedding when he was told to stay behind for an anti-terrorism exercise. Instead, he became entangled in a failed coup attempt that would lead to a life sentence.
A decade later, Mr. Kalin, now 34, remains in prison far from home. His parents, sitting in their Ankara flat, leaf through photo albums of happier times. Mr. Kalin was a trainee air force pilot selected for F-16 training at Akinci base, the epicenter of the coup plot. Officials say he was deeply involved in the plan to overthrow President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, but his family insists he was an unwitting pawn.
“There were 60 F-16 pilot candidates, and they divided them into four groups. Because they didn’t have the capacity to train all 60 at once, they staggered them,” his brother Ilker Kalin explained. By a twist of fate, Alper was in the first group of 14 sent to Akinci after basic training — the only ones caught up in the chaos.
Told that they were taking part in an anti-terror exercise, their superiors collected their phones, leaving them clueless as the night unfolded, claiming about 250 lives and wounding 2,000. Cut off from the outside, Mr. Kalin returned home at 7 a.m., his mother recalled, with a face “ashen, terrified.”
Eleven days after the coup, Mr. Kalin was called back to Akinci to testify. His father, Ali, a retired military man, was not worried. But his son was handcuffed on arrival and never returned. After a four-year trial, Alper Kalin and 12 others from his training program were sentenced to life on November 26, 2020, for attempting to “overthrow the constitutional order.” Statements from their commanding officers that the youngsters knew nothing did not help.
Nearly 500 people were involved in the Akinci trial, with 484 handed life sentences, including 114 trainee officers. “Hundreds of cadets went into the streets on orders of their commanders. They had absolutely no idea why,” said political scientist Ahmet Insel.
At the end of 2023, Turkey's highest appeals court upheld an aggravated life sentence: solitary confinement with two visits a month from family. Mr. Kalin is held in Diyarbakir, 1,000 kilometers from Ankara, and is not allowed more than five T-shirts or to wear blue or green — the colors of the police and army.
As Turkey marks 10 years since the coup, which allowed President Erdogan to tighten his grip on power, the family has no expectations. “We want this government to change. To correct the injustices that have torn us apart,” his mother said.
