Four years ago, Moldova secretly extradited seven Turkish teachers. In less than a day, the detained teachers were handed over to Turkey, where they were sentenced to long prison terms. Details of the extradition have been kept secret all this time, on the grounds that it is a state secret. However, in the summer of 2022, the file was declassified and NewsMaker.md came into possession of some documents.

The “special operation” was allegedly prepared by the Anti-Terrorist Centre of the Intelligence and Security Service (SIS), and its details were carefully concealed. According to declassified documents in the possession of which NewsMaker.md has entered, on September 5, 2018, several SIS officers were asked to be “prepared”. The next day, at 05:00, an operational meeting was held. SIS officers involved in the operation were divided into groups of three to four people. They received envelopes with information about Turkish citizens whose presence in Moldova was considered “undesirable”. They were to be detained and taken to the Migration and Asylum Office, but on the way SIS officers received a new order: to take the Turkish teachers directly to the airport.

According to the source, the participants in the operation later said they did not know who gave the order. But a chartered plane was already waiting for the teachers at the airport, and once they landed in Turkey, Turkish intelligence officers met them. Ten days later, one of the deputy directors of SIS was to resign. And the then head of the SIS, Vasile Botnari, two years later, would become the sole accused in the case of the illegal expulsion of the Turkish teachers.

Earlier, ZdG wrote that on the morning of September 6, 2018, seven employees of the “Orizont” high school network were detained while leaving their homes to go to work and transported to Chisinau International Airport, where a plane, paid for by the Intelligence and Security Service (SIS), was waiting to take them to their home country, Turkey.

Five of the seven teachers applied for refugee status in Moldova because they feared reprisals in their home country, Turkey, based on their political views.

Shortly after the expulsion, the families of the teachers received letters with the decisions of the Migration and Asylum Office notifying them about the rejection of their asylum applications and the ban on entering the territory of Moldova for five years. The office claimed that the five teachers had met the legal requirements for granting asylum in Moldova, but found, however, on the basis of a secret memo received from the Moldovan intelligence services, that they posed a “threat to national security”.

In September and October 2018, the teachers’ representative, who was empowered by proxy by their wives, challenged the Bureau’s decisions in court.

In June 2019, the European Court of Human Rights condemned Moldova for violating the rights of Turkish citizens who were expelled in September 2018. Before the Court, the applicants stated that they were unlawfully detained and illegally handed over to the Turkish authorities. The Moldovan government acknowledged that the Turkish citizens had been detained, but stated before the Court that this was justified and that the applicants did not object to their expulsion to their country of origin.

Although the Government in Chisinau insisted that it was not aware of the applicants’ fears of being deported to Turkey, the Court notes that in their asylum applications the applicants clearly expressed their fear of being persecuted in Turkey. At the same time, in its decision of 4 September 2018 in relation to these asylum applications, the Migration and Asylum Office considered that the applicants’ fear of political persecution in Turkey was well founded.

For the illegal expulsion of the Turkish teachers, former SIS director Vasile Botnari was sentenced to a suspended sentence in September 2020 and was to pay a fine of 88 thousand lei.