Turkey - 3 former ministers to be named members of criminal organization in graft indictment, Al Jazeera claims.

Turkey - 3 former ministers to be named members of criminal organization in graft indictment, Al Jazeera claims.(TZ).

Three of the four former Cabinet ministers who are involved in an ongoing graft probe are being referred to in the indictment about to be completed by prosecutors as high-level officials of a criminal organization, the Turkish version of the Al Jazeera news portal claimed on Wednesday.

“It will say in detail [in the indictment] that [three of] the former ministers are part of the hierarchic structure of the organization and that they occupy high positions within it,” the Al Jazeera Turk news portal, which has recently started to be published in Turkish, said.

According the report, out of the 94 people who were taken into custody as part of the corruption probe, 24 have so far been arrested. 

The sons of Güler and Çağlayan are also among those arrested as part of the probe, while the son of the fourth former minister involved in the graft, Environment and Urban Planning Minister Erdoğan Bayraktar, was released pending trial. 

Responding to the news portal's questions on Wednesday Güler dismissed allegations about corruption saying, “There is nothing I cannot account for.” 

Noting that he has refrained so far from speaking on the issue, as there is an ongoing judicial process, the former interior minister said: “I will make a statement in the days to come. I do not want to speak at the moment.”

According to the report prosecutor Celal Kara is working to complete the indictment for the corruption probe in which Reza Zarrab, an Iranian business person of Azeri origin who lives in Turkey, and Süleyman Arslan, the manager of Halkbank, a public bank, are also among arrested suspects.

“But it is not clear whether the name of Erdoğan Bayraktar will appear in the indictment being prepared by Mehmet Yüzgeç,” the report said. 

A criminal organization allegedly headed by Iranian business person Zarrab is claimed to have distributed to the ministers and their sons a total of TL 137 million ($66 million) in bribes to cloak fictitious exports and money laundering in which the organization was allegedly engaged. 

Since the launch of the graft probe, the government has replaced more than 2,000 police officers and some chiefs of police in various provinces, mainly in İstanbul and Ankara, some of them directly involved in the carrying out of the probe. 

Around 20 prosecutors, some of them being those who were conducting the graft probe, were removed from their posts and were appointed to other posts.Read the full story here.