ISTANBUL - A retired Turkish general charged over a plot to unseat the government said on Saturday "the struggle has now started", after high-profile arrests risked aggravating tension between the ruling AK Party and the armed forces. Two former generals became the most senior figures late on Friday to be charged over an alleged 2003 plot, state-run news agency Anatolian reported, their arrests closing a week of high political drama that has stunned Turkey and shaken markets. Hours earlier, police had conducted a second wave of detentions of military officers, widening an unprecedented investigation that has seen some 33 officers arrested and prompted an emergency summit among Turkey's leaders. President Abdullah Gul, a former member of the AK Party which has its roots in political Islam, pledged "Turkey will overcome all of its problems." But, in an interview published in the Hurriyet newspaper on Saturday, he also warned those who act outside the law within Turkish institutions would be purged. Retired general Cetin Dogan was the former head of Turkey's First Army and as such had occupied a position often seen as a step towards becoming head of the Turkish Armed Forces. "When Dogan learned he was to be charged he said 'the struggle has now started'," his lawyer Celal Ulgen said on Saturday, according to Anatolian. Ulgen added there was no concrete evidence and prosecutors went to great lengths to have him charged. The other high-ranking official to be charged was Lieutenant General Engin Alan, a former special forces commander who led a successful operation to capture the country's most wanted man, Kurdish separatist leader Abdullah Ocalan, and bring him back to Turkey in 1999. Turkish newspapers on Saturday printed pictures of an elderly-looking Dogan, dressed in a dark coat and cravat and walking with a slight stoop, as police took him for questioning. Turkish markets, weakened by five days of tension since a first wave of detentions on Monday, had begun to recover on Friday on hopes that the likelihood of a confrontation between the government, in power since 2002, and the secularist military was receding with the release of three other retired generals. But reports police had detained 17 more serving military officers and one retired officer in a second wave of detentions sparked renewed selling, and fresh concern over a standoff.
