Suspects on trial over last year’s coup attempt in Turkey will wear a brown uniform during their hearings, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has announced, after a controversy over a defendant wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the word “hero” during a court appearance.

The Turkish president made his announcement during a speech in the city of Malatya, days after nearly 500 defendants, including top generals and officers, appeared in court. It was the largest mass trial of suspects accused of masterminding and carrying out the attempted putsch last July, in which 250 people were killed and 1,400 wounded. “There will be no more coming to courts wearing whatever they want,” Erdoğan said, according to the daily newspaper Hürriyet. “They will be introduced to the world like that.”

A suspect accused of belonging to the Fethullah Gülen movement, which is widely believed in Turkey to have masterminded the coup attempt and is led by an exiled preacher in the United States, wore the “hero” T-shirt to his hearing.

Several people were detained afterwards for wearing the same shirt. At a rally on the anniversary of the coup last month, Erdoğan had called for the suspects to be dressed in orange jumpsuits like those worn by people incarcerated in the US prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Tens of thousands of people have been dismissed from their jobs or detained over alleged links to the Gülen movement in the months since the failed coup, and trials are ongoing for many of the top military officers and civilians accused by prosecutors of leading the putsch. The broad crackdown has gone beyond the alleged perpetrators, however, and has ensnared journalists, academics, judges and civil servants.(theguardian)…[+]