Officer Said He Fled Turkey, Carrying Evidence of Corruption

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Huseyin Korkmaz, a Turkish police supervisor in Istanbul, began an investigation in 2012 into a money laundering and bribery ring led by Reza Zarrab, a Turkish-Iranian businessman who was secretly smuggling gold for oil in violation of United States sanctions on Iran.

The investigation broadened to include several government ministers, the general manger of a Turkish state bank and Recep Tayyip Erdogan, then Turkey’s prime minister and now its president, Mr. Korkmaz testified in a Manhattan courtroom on Monday.

In a dawn raid on Dec. 17, 2013, Mr. Zarrab, the banker and the businessmen sons of three ministers were arrested on corruption and bribery charges. But the Turkish government stepped in quickly to release them, and quashed the investigation. Three dozen police officers and officials were purged within days. Mr. Korkmaz was reassigned, sent to guard a bridge, he testified, and was later jailed.

Mr. Korkmaz was eventually released and later had himself smuggled out of Turkey. He made it to the United States with his wife and daughter, carrying a trove of evidence from the corruption investigation.

He gave the files to United States law enforcement authorities, who have used the material to prosecute Mr. Zarrab, who has since pleaded guilty and is cooperating with the government, and Mehmet Hakan Atilla, a deputy general manager of the Turkish bank Halkbank, whose trial in Manhattan entered its third week on Monday.

Much of the trial has focused on Mr. Zarrab’s testimony, in which he implicated Mr. Erdogan in the sanctions-evasion scheme and described how he had paid tens of millions of dollars in bribes to Zafer Caglayan, then Turkey’s economy minister.

Mr. Zarrab, a flashy gold trader who is married to a Turkish pop star and who often appeared in Turkish celebrity magazines, said he alone had made as much as $150 million in the scheme.

Mr. Korkmaz, a slight man of 30 years old, was anything but flashy as he testified for the prosecution and admitted that he had known little about Mr. Zarrab when the investigation began.

“The rest of the team knew him through magazine news, through entertainment news,” he said. “I was not into those.”

Mr. Korkmaz, testifying through an interpreter, described the investigation’s findings, many of which are already known in Turkey. He cited the discovery of bribe payments delivered in shoe boxes and a discussion by Mr. Zarrab and Mr. Caglayan about delivering money to Mr. Erdogan’s son.

His most riveting testimony was about being a police officer who did not want an investigation to disappear.

Days after the arrests, he and others on his team were reassigned, he said, and told that they did not have the authority to investigate the government ministers or Mr. Erdogan. He said he had prepared reports of the investigation and had them delivered to a prosecutor and to Parliament.

After being released from prison in February 2016, he said, he did not feel “legally secure in any way,” and he fled Turkey that August. He took as much of the evidence as he could, obtained from a prosecutor and another investigator. “Both the prosecutor and I believed that the evidence would never be brought up in court” and would probably be “damaged or destroyed.”

“I took initiative in order to preserve the evidence,” he testified.

He described a complex journey, using a false passport, through several countries before he arrived in the United States, with the help of American law enforcement officials.

He told the jury that he believed that in Turkey, the right to defend one’s freedom had been lost. “So I took my wife and my daughter,” he said, “and I left the country that I dearly love.”