Turkiye’s authorities detained three additional mayors from the main opposition party on Saturday, according to a prosecutor’s statement and local media, further widening a months-long legal crackdown that has now extended beyond its initial focus on Istanbul.
The mayors of the big southern cities of Adana and Adiyaman were detained on allegations of extortion, the Istanbul chief prosecutor’s office said, along with some eight other people.
Broadcaster NTV said Antalya’s mayor and the deputy mayor of Istanbul’s Buyukcekmece district were also detained as part of the broader investigation in which hundreds of members of the Republic People’s Party (CHP), including 11 mayors previously, have been targeted since October last year.
The CHP broadly denies the charges and calls the probe politically driven, charges the government denies.
In March Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, the main political rival of President Tayyip Erdogan, was jailed pending trial on corruption charges, which he denies. That sparked the largest street protests in a decade and a sharp selloff in Turkish assets.
Expanding Opposition Crackdown
On Tuesday, Turkish authorities detained 157 people in Izmir, including opposition party members and a former mayor, broadcaster NTV reported, marking an expansion of the months-long crackdown on the opposition that had previously centred on Istanbul.
The Izmir prosecutor ordered the detentions in the early morning hours as part of an investigation into corruption, tender rigging and fraud in the west-coast city, NTV reported.
Murat Bakan, an Izmir MP from the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) – which has faced waves of arrests since late last year – said former Izmir Mayor Tunc Soyer was detained along with senior bureaucrats and a party provincial chairman.
“We woke up to another dawn operation today,” he said on X. “We are facing a process similar to what happened in Istanbul,” Bakan said, adding that it appeared to be “a judicial system acting on instructions”.
(With inputs from Reuters)
