The Turkish Foreign Ministry has denied that a man arrested in Tel Aviv for allegedly filming women and underage girls in dressing rooms at a beach is a diplomat, saying he was temporarily assigned to assist with an embassy building relocation, the T24 news website reported.
The suspect, identified by Israeli media as 29-year-old Ömer Sefa Köse, was detained on Friday after police received reports that a man had been filming girls, some as young as 13, at Frishman Beach in Tel Aviv. According to Israeli authorities, explicit images were later found on his cellphone.
Köse was reportedly working for Turkey’s embassy in Tel Aviv at the time. However, Turkish Foreign Ministry sources told T24 that he is not a member of the diplomatic staff but rather had been assigned for three weeks to help with the move of the chancery building.
“There is no evidence that has been shared with us yet,” ministry officials told T24, adding that Köse denied the allegations. “If necessary, an investigation will also be launched in Turkey.”
According to Israeli media, the Israeli police said the suspect was caught by patrol officers shortly after a complaint was filed by a woman who said she saw a phone protruding from the door of her changing stall. Three women have since made statements to the police. Köse was brought before a Tel Aviv court on Saturday and remanded in custody on suspicion of sexual harassment until Monday.
Turkish media also reported that Turkey’s diplomatic mission had requested that Köse be put under house arrest on the embassy compound, a request that was reportedly denied by Israeli authorities.
Köse has been publicly identified in Turkey as one of the people wounded during a failed coup on July 15, 2016. A tweet posted by Lokman Ertürk, the former mayor of Kahramankazan, a district in Ankara, shows in December 2018 Köse being hosted at the local municipality along with another man referred to as a “veteran” of the 2016 coup night. “We hosted our brothers, veteran Ömer Ersoy and veteran Ömer Sefa Köse, who were wounded at the presidential complex on the night of July 15,” the former mayor wrote.
15 Temmuz Gecesi Cumhurbaşkanlığı Küliyesinde Gazi olan kardeşlerimiz Gazi Ömer Ersoy ve Gazi Ömer Sefa Köse ‘yi Kahramankazan Belediyemizde ağırladık. #Minnettarız #15TemmuzDestanı pic.twitter.com/5T59BmgE7g
— Lokman Ertürk (@Lokman_Erturk) December 24, 2018
The Turkish government launched a massive crackdown on non-loyalist people following the coup attempt on the pretext of an anti-coup fight and purged more than 127,000 people from the civil service.
Among the hardest-hit institutions was the foreign ministry, which lost a significant portion of its personnel through government decrees.
Former foreign minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu revealed in October 2022, in response to a parliamentary question, that 662 ministry employees had been removed from public service since July 20, 2016, when the government declared a state of emergency that lasted for two years.
The minister did not reveal how many of the purged personnel were career diplomats and how many were civil servants.
The Turkish government has long been the target of criticism for ending merit-based appointments in state agencies, engaging in favoritism and filling state posts with its cronies.
The foreign ministry, known as the most prestigious state institution in Turkey, used to select its personnel from successful graduates of well-known universities who received the highest scores on the central state personnel exam in addition to interviews conducted by the ministry.
Now, the ministry’s diplomats frequently come under criticism due to their poor language skills, lack of professional credentials and controversial acts in diplomatic settings.