The Religious Affairs Turkish Islamic Union (DITIB) working under the Turkish religious affairs institution with close to 900 mosques in Germany held their general assembly in Cologne. In a sham election in the assembly, the president and executive board members for DITIB were determined. 

The president and vice president of DITIB, which has functioned like the intelligence and propaganda apparatus of the Turkish state, were determined directly by the Erdogan regime so the institution will be completely under Ankara's control. 

Berlin Embassy Religious Affairs Undersecretary Kazim Turkmen was appointed the President of DITIB, and Religious Affairs Atache in the Cologne Consulate from 2014 to 2017 Ahmet Dilek was appointed President. Since September last year, Dilek had been on duty as the proxy president after Nevzat Asikoglu was removed from office immediately after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's visit to Germany. 

7 OPERATIVE-IMAMS WORKING UNDER DILEK EXPOSED 

Following the coup attempt on July 15, 2016, the Erdogan government terminated several imams for being associated with the Gulen movement, and since then the imams and DITIB administrators have been specially selected to be sent to Germany. But this time, the Erdogan regime has blatantly taken an institution operating under Germany's laws under its own control. 

Ahmet Dilek is one of the men German intelligence knows well and has investigated as the chief of the MIT (Turkish intelligence service) operatives within the DITIB. By early 2017, when the relationship between the Erdogan regime and the Merkel government was distraught, it had become public agenda how DITIB imams worked for the MIT and engaged in Erdogan propaganda under the guise of sermons. During that time, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution in the North Rhine Westphalia State determined at least 13 MIT operative imams. 

7 of these imams/operatives were in Cologne and worked under Dilek, who was rumored to relay the information gathered through imams to Ankara. The imams in question were reporting detailed information about who came to their mosques. German intelligence had also determined that the religious ataches in Dusseldorf and Munich as well as Cologne worked as MIT chapters and carried out house raids against the imams in February 2017 under orders from the Federal Prosecutor's Office.. 

INVESTIGATIONS AGAINST 19 DITIB MEMBERS SHELVED 

Despite being exposed and proven to work as an intelligence service for the Erdogan regime several times with documents, the espionage investigations against DITIB, which receives funding from the German state, had been dropped. The Federal Prosecutor's Office had failed to advance at all during the full year of investigation and in the end shelved the cases against 19 DITIB workers. 

DITIB turning into an institution completely controlled by Erdogan had ever caused quite the stir within DITIB. Most recently, Lower Saxony DITIB President Yilmaz Kilic had announced his resignation due to Turkish state interventions in November. Kilic had been in this office for the last 7 years and as he resigned and said interventions by the DITIB center and the Turkish Embassy in Cologne had become unbearable.