ANKARA (Reuters) - Turkish lawmakers on Friday abolished special courts which had convicted hundreds of alleged military coup plotters, as Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan battles a new foe he sees as using influence in the judiciary to try to unseat him.
Erdogan's Islamist-rooted AK Party is widely held to have relied heavily on U.S.-based Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen's influence in the police and judiciary in breaking the power of the army, which carried out three coups between 1960 and 1980 and forced an Islamist-led government from power in 1997.
