Dozens of supporters of Turkish main opposition party were detained last night during a protest organised in Istanbul to mark 100 days since the arrest of the city’s metropolitan mayor, Ekrem İmamoğlu, on charges of corruption.
Turkish media reported that the protest organised by the Republican People’s Party (CHP) was concentrated last night in Saraçhane Square, near the headquarters of the city’s metropolitan municipality, where thousands of people took part in a demonstration that began with the reading of a message from İmamoğlu in which he accused the government of “seeking to subjugate the people to establish a regime without opposition, where those who are elected at the ballot box do not go out through the ballot box”. For his part, the current CHP chairman and opposition leader, Özgür Özel, again described the arrest of the Istanbul mayor as a “coup d’état“.
After the end of the event in Saraçhane, a group of protesters who refused to leave the site clashed with riot police. Turkish Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya reported via social media that legal proceedings had been initiated against 42 people who had been arrested for “resisting authority”, “insulting the President of the Republic” and “violating the law on assemblies and demonstrations”.
Justice Minister Yılmaz Tunç confirmed these arrests; Tunç also referred in recent hours to the arrest of several members of the satirical magazine ‘Leman’ for publishing a cartoon of Muhammad and Moses, and reported that the judge had ordered the remand in custody of the 4 detained employees of the magazine, while a search and arrest warrant has been issued for two editors of the magazine – one of them the owner of the publication – who are abroad.
İmamoğlu, Istanbul’s metropolitan mayor since 2019 for Turkish main opposition party, was arrested on 19 March and four days later the judge ordered him to be remanded in prison pending trial on alleged corruption charges against him. Since then, Turkish authorities have expanded the investigation with dozens of new arrests and investigations, which led yesterday to the arrest of four more people linked to the Izmir Metropolitan Municipality, also governed by the CHP: among those arrested in Izmir are the CHP president of the province, Şenol Aslanoğlu, and the former mayor of Izmir, Tunç Soyer.
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Edited and reviewed by:
Pablo Gómez is a specialist in Turkey and has been editor-in-chief of Hispanatolia since 2011. He has been analysing current affairs and geopolitics in Turkey and the surrounding region since 2006.
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