Mayor In Turkey Arrested On Charges Of Involvement In PPK Branded Terrorist

UNSPLASH/Igor HISTORY ILLUSTRATION

JAKARTA - A mayor from Turkey's main opposition, the People's Party of the Republic (CHP) was arrested on suspicion of becoming a member of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which is prohibited from being a terrorist group in Turkey.

As reported by Reuters on Thursday, October 31, the arrest of Ahmet Ozer, the mayor of the Esenyurt district in Istanbul, came after an attack on Turkish defense firm TUSAS that killed five people in Ankara last week, an attack claimed by the PKK as its responsibility.

This also comes amid talks about peace efforts carried out by President Tayyip Erdogan's close ally, the first attempt in a decade to end Turkey's 40-year conflict with Kurdish militants.

Ozer denied the allegations related to terrorism he was accused of.

The CHP said it would defend its so-called baseless accusations reflecting the government's latest efforts to target the opposition through courts, and urged the public to protest in Esenyurt.

Erdogan's administration has denied similar accusations made by his party in the past.

The CHP manages Esenyurt's municipality, one of the country's largest cities, with about 1 million people, many of them immigrants.

Ozer, a professor of sociology, is a former adviser to the Mayor of Istanbul Ekrem Imamoglu, who has the potential to challenge Erdogan in the future. He also faces legal hurdles and has appealed prison sentences and political bans.

"We see political interference in the justice system. We know there is a politically engineered plot," Imamoglu said on Wednesday.

He said the mayor's arrest was confusing given the peace proposal submitted by Erdogan's allies.

Aysegul Dogan, spokesman for the pro-Kurdish DEM Party, the third-largest party in parliament, condemned Ozer's arrest and said he was elected with the support of the party. The arrests were called weakening the democratic opposition'.