The political climate during the regime change from 2007 would be imbued with a frenzied debate in society over a series of legal investigations into the allegations of long- active military and paramilitary ‘gangs’ in the country. The activities associated with the gangs purportedly indicated a mammoth crime syndicate, dubbed ‘Ergenekon’, after a nationalist legend of the same name. The culprits had aimed, according to the prosecutors, to create far- reaching chaos and uncertainty in the land by high- profile assassinations and general carnage, with the objective of creating fertile ground and justification for a possible military takeover in the face of an increasingly debilitated civilian government. The investigations would begin in June 2007, when a number of hand grenades, TNT blocks and detonators would be found stowed in a shanty town house in an outlying district of Istanbul. The hand grenades, identified as from the stocks of the military, would be claimed to be of the same batch as those used in fourteen prior and unsolved incidents. The deepening investigations would transform in time into nine separate cases, either related or complementary in content, and later to be reduced to five, with some combined by courts in the process. These five cases would come to be known as Ergenekon, Poyrazköy, Balyoz (the Sledgehammer), Şile, and OdaTV. The hearings would start in October 2008 following a set of unusually lengthy indictments by the prosecutors, each amounting to thousands of pages. Those key legal texts would be positively stupefying in their endless details, both relevant and, not infrequently, trivial. Worse still, characteristically perhaps for the local judiciary, the articulations in these main accusatory instruments would be in extremely poor, convoluted wording, defying easy and full comprehension. The result would be a bewildering maze of alleged conspiracies, simultaneously eliciting alarm and incredulity from the public, hence an increasingly widened split in public opinion in the subsequent period over the investigations. Those within the broad ‘democratic’ camp led by the government until 2011 would, on the whole, view the hearings as akin to truth commissions, to throw some much- needed light for a clean slate on state complicity in political assassinations and extrajudicial killings in the recent past of a country where authority had long been shared between fragile civilian governments and a high- powered bureaucracy.