Fears of stand-off with military grow amid new Turkish arrests

A retired general charged over an alleged plot to unseat the government last night said "the struggle had now started" , a thinly veiled threat that the army may once again intervene in Turkish politics.

General Cetin Dogan was speaking through his lawyer after he was jailed on remand, along with another general.

A former head of Turkey's First Army – and widely tipped to become the nation's most powerful serviceman – Dogan was charged late on Friday.

Police spent much of last week rounding up military officers over allegations of a coup planned back in 2003. New detentions on Friday brought the total number of officers in custody to 33.

"When Dogan learned he was to be charged he said 'the fight has started now'," the general's lawyer, Celal Ulgen, said.

He added there was no concrete evidence against Dogan 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 markets, weakened by five days of tension since a first wave of arrests 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 sparked renewed selling and fresh concern over a possible standoff.

"The second wave of arrests will have raised the tensions," said Istanbul-based analyst Gareth Jenkins, ahead of news of the retired generals' arrest. "Should the pair be charged and held on remand this could up the stakes."

Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan's AK Party, which denies accusations it has a secret Islamist agenda, is banking on an economic recovery to win over voters ahead of an election due early next year.

The military has overthrown four governments in Turkey in the past 50 years.

Some analysts said Dogan was a key player in the campaign that, in 1997, ousted from power the Islamist Welfare Party led by Erdogan's mentor, Necmettin Erbakant. Erdogan was the Welfare Party's vocal mayor of Istanbul at the time. Secularists suspect Erdogan and his party of trying to Islamicise the state by stealth; filling the bureaucracy and judiciary with supporters.