An Ankara court acquitted Turkish religious leader Fethullah Gulen of trying to overturn Turkey's secular regime, the Anatolia news agency reported on Friday.

  The decision possibly allows him to return to the country after years of self-imposed exile in the United States.

  Gulen, a preacher, author and mystic scholar whose religious sect runs schools across Turkey and Central Asia, had been accused of trying to create an Islamic state in Turkey and of "brainwashing" schoolchildren.