Ever since the coup attempt in Turkey it happens again and again. Now, two victims describe what it’s like to be cut off from the world, tortured and pressured to testify against their friends.

BERLIN – One morning in the first half of 2017, a black van stopped on a street in the Turkish capital Ankara. Two men in civilian clothes stepped out and pounced on a man walking by. They dragged him into the van and sped off. The whole incident took no more than a few minutes, according to media reports and human rights groups.

The man who was kidnapped tried to fight off his assailants, but they beat him, covered his head with a black hood and cuffed his feet, he said. A year after the incident, he still has a big scar on his leg, a souvenir of the wound he sustained during the kidnapping.

“I quickly realized that there was no point in trying to defend myself, and that I had to calm down and act in a calculated way,” the man, who is using the pseudonym Tolga, told Haaretz and other journalists in a joint investigation by nine international media coordinated by the nonprofit newsroom CORRECTIV.

As the kidnappers’ vehicle approached the facility where Tolga would remain for months, he heard a large iron gate open. He was taken to a closed facility, where he was put in a cell. The door closed and he could hear instructions over a loudspeaker: Every time there was a knock at the door, he would have to turn to the wall and look at the floor so he would not see his captors.

“I saw all my loved ones before my eyes – I thought they were going to kill me,” he said.

In the weeks following his abduction, his relatives, along with lawyers and human rights activists, tried to locate Tolga but could find out nothing. His family launched a campaign on social media, and also appealed to the foreign media and the international community – but not a shred of information could be found.

Since the coup attempt in Turkey in July 2016, several disappearances of civilians have been reported; most occurred in Ankara in broad daylight. They all follow a similar pattern: The victims were pulled into a black commercial vehicle, a Volkswagen van, by people who didn’t try to conceal themselves. Subsequent attempts to locate the abducted person failed, and many families reported that the authorities ignored their requests for help.

Testimonies, videos and documents that reached Haaretz and the other journalists raise suspicions that the Turkish government is behind the forced disappearance of Turkish citizens, most of them linked to the movement of the cleric Fethullah Gulen, who lives in exile in Pennsylvania and who the government accuses of orchestrating the attempted coup.

Tolga and another man, Ali (also a pseudonym), related separately and without knowing each other the chain of events. They both said they were held for a long time in facilities they could not identify, and that for their entire captivity they had no access to the outside world. They underwent interrogation and torture designed to make them testify against their friends.

By press time, the Turkish government had not responded to queries about forced disappearances. But Mustafa Yeneroglu, the chairman of the Turkish parliament’s human rights committee, told BBC Turkey in June 2017 that the committee had opened an investigation into the cases that had been referred to it.

Turkish officials, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan among them, have rejected accusations of torture during arrests in Turkey. Officials have called such accusations unfounded and said the government’s policy is “zero tolerance for torture.”