PRIME Minister Binali Yildirim vowed yesterday to root out agents of US-based preacher Fethullah Gulen from Turkey as the government crackdown on suspected coup plotters continued.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) claims Mr Gulen, its former ally, was behind Friday’s failed military coup.

“I’m sorry but this parallel terrorist organisation will no longer be an effective pawn for any country,” Mr Yildirim said.

“We will dig them up by their roots so that no clandestine terrorist organisation will have the nerve to betray our blessed people again.”

Mr Erdogan’s spokesman Ibrahim Kalin hit out at Mr Gulen’s claims that the government organised the coup as a “false flag” operation to justify a purge of political opponents.

“It is really nonsensical,” he said. “This is no different really than claiming 9/11 was orchestrated by the United States and that the Paris and Nice attacks were orchestrated by the French government.” Turkey’s Supreme Board of Radio and Television said it had cancelled all TV and radio broadcast licences for media outlets linked to or supporting Mr Gulen.

And Ankara is demanding Washington extradite Mr Gulen, who lives on a 400-acre estate in Pennsylvania.

On Monday the US military news website Stars and Stripes reported that electricity to the Incirlik air base — where the US Air Force has large forces and more than 50 B61 nuclear bombs — had still not been turned back on after being cut on Saturday morning before the coup was defeated.

As the purge of real or suspected coup sympathisers continued, UN high commissioner for human rights Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein made an unprecedented call for independent observers to be sent to Turkish prisons to check the conditions of those arrested and urged the government to uphold the rule of law and human rights. Some 85 generals and admirals have been detained pending trial.

On Monday officials said nearly 9,000 police officers had been dismissed out of a total force of several hundred thousand and the Board of Higher Education has pressed 1,577 university faculty deans to resign after the Ministry of National Education sacked 15,200 staff.

The asylum hearing of eight officers who fled to Greece has begun.

Whistleblowing website Wikileaks claimed it had come under a “sustained” cyber­attack on Monday night after it announced the coming release of more than 100,000 leaked documents relating to the AKP.

A blast was reported to have rocked Turkey’s capital Ankara yesterday afternoon.

Initial details were sketchy, with images and videos of a huge column of smoke rising from the city centre appearing on Twitter.

The authorities, however, denied that an explosion had taken place, attributing the smoke to a fire in a residential area.