[There was a video here]

Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan landed at Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport at around 9 p.m. ET (4 a.m. in Istanbul) according to NBC, where he addressed reporters and thousands of supporters.

Erdoğan repeated his call from earlier that “the people of this nation should go out ... should go out on the streets, on the arenas.” He said that some of the coup plotters have been arrested, and that Turkey “cannot be governed from Pennsylvania,” a reference to Fethullah Gulen, a Turkish religious scholar who has been in self-imposed exile since 1999 and is believed by some to be behind the attempted coup. Hours after it began, Gulen condemned the attempted coup:

In a somewhat more formal address to the nation later, Erdoğan said that the coup plotters would “pay for this in the harshest way.” He then went further and said the “attempted uprising” was a “gift from god to us, because this will help us clean our military from the members of this gang.”

He also gave a clue as to the timing of the attempted coup, saying there were to be military meetings and August, and that “it’s very meaningful that they timed this upsizing right before these meetings, and they were aware of what will happen at those meetings. They were afraid of some decisions that will be taken at those meetings.”

[MSNBC]