FETHULLAH GULEN, a reclusive US-based Islamic cleric who faced accusations he masterminded a failed 2016 coup in his native Turkey, has died.

Mr Gulen, who was in his eighties and had long been ill, spent the last decades of his life in self-exile, living in a gated compound in Pennsylvania.

He began as an ally of Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan but became a foe. He called Mr Erdogan an authoritarian bent on accumulating power and crushing dissent.

Mr Erdogan cast Mr Gulen as a terrorist, accusing him of orchestrating the failed military coup on July 15 2016, when factions within the military used tanks, warplanes and helicopters to try to overthrow the government. A total of 251 people were killed and around 2,200 others were wounded.

Mr Gulen adamantly denied involvement, and his supporters dismissed the charges as politically motivated.

Turkey put Mr Gulen on its most-wanted list and demanded his extradition, but the US showed little inclination to send him back, saying it needed more evidence.

Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said today that Gulen’s death “will not make us complacent or relaxed. This organisation has been a threat rarely seen in the history of our nation.”

He called on Mr Gulen’s followers to turn away from “this treasonous wrong path.”

In Turkey, Gulen’s movement — sometimes known as Hizmet, Turkish for “service” — has been subjected to a broad crackdown. The government arrested tens of thousands of people for alleged links to the coup plot, sacked more than 130,000 suspected supporters from civil service jobs and more than 23,000 from the military, and closed hundreds of businesses, schools and media organisations tied to Gulen.

Mr Gulen called the crackdown a witch hunt and denounced Turkey’s leaders as “tyrants.”

“The last year has taken a toll on me as hundreds of thousands of innocent Turkish citizens are being punished simply because the government decides they are somehow ‘connected’ to me or the Hizmet movement and treats that alleged connection as a crime,” he said on the first anniversary of the failed coup.