Turkey has arrested three extra opposition mayors early as a part of an investigation into alleged graft, officers from the principle opposition Republican Folks’s Social gathering (CHP) mentioned, denouncing the arrests as a politically motivated crackdown.
Saturday’s arrests are the newest in a sequence of strikes concentrating on CHP officers because the social gathering’s landslide win within the 2024 native elections, which dealt a significant blow to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s ruling AKP.
The stress comes because the CHP climbs in nationwide polls and positions itself for the 2028 presidential race.
These detained have been Zeydan Karalar, mayor of Adana; Muhittin Böcek, mayor of the Mediterranean resort metropolis of Antalya; and Abdurrahman Tutdere, mayor of Adıyaman in Turkey’s southeast – all key CHP strongholds.
The arrests have been linked to a sweeping corruption probe that earlier this yr noticed Istanbul’s influential opposition mayor, Ekrem İmamoğlu, faraway from workplace.
His jailing in March sparked the nation’s largest road protests because the 2013 Gezi Park demonstrations. İmamoğlu is Erdoğan’s largest political rival.
Earlier this week, police arrested 137 individuals as a part of this probe within the opposition stronghold of Izmir, Turkey’s third metropolis. They have been nonetheless searching for others below a prosecutor’s arrest warrant that named 157 individuals.
On Tuesday, greater than 10,000 individuals joined a protest rally outdoors Istanbul Metropolis Corridor, marking 100 days since İmamoğlu’s sentencing.
Erdoğan, nevertheless, dismissed the protests and the backlash. They (the CHP) “try to cowl up their crimes and whitewash their criminals with road protests in an effort to put on down our judicial establishments,” he mentioned in remarks relayed by state information company Anadolu on Saturday.
Police additionally arrested the deputy mayor of Istanbul’s Buyukcekmece district, Ahmet Sahin, as a part of the identical probe, on-line information web site BirGun reported.
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