Who Is Behind Sex Traps Used to Blackmail Turkish Military Officials? Scandal Revealed

Despite a lack of media coverage on the topic, the Sweden-based Nordic Monitor website has published a lengthy investigation detailing a major sex scandal allegedly involving high-ranking military officers in the Turkish military.

In the report written by the Turkish journalist Abdullah Bozkurt, the director of Nordic Monitor who resides in Stockholm, scanned photos of documents obtained by the website have highlighted names of a number of Turkish officers who have been blackmailed by a criminal gang in Turkey since 2012.

The gang, reportedly led by Bilgin Özkaynak, has been sending female escorts to these officers in honey traps, while filming them to make sure they never refuse the gang's demands.

According to the report, the gang has repeatedly asked blackmailed officers for critical and top-secret military documents, threatening to post their sex videos online in case they refused.

While the report highlights names of a number of leading military personnel who have been victims of this blackmailing ring, including a high-ranking NATO unit leader filmed in a compromising situation while in a training period in Bangladesh, the report stresses that most of the officers named in the scandal were later promoted to even higher positions by the Recep Tayyip Erdoğan government, especially following orders of closing legal investigations into the matter, ones that were open previously.

Moreover, the report details military missions some of the involved officers were tasked with, including missions in Syria, Iraq, Libya, and Azerbaijan.

The report directly accuses the conservative president of Turkey of whitewashing the sex scandals in recent years, as the Turkish military has been noticeably more involved in regional and international military conflicts.