Turkey detains senior Kurdish politician

ANKARA, Turkey (Kurdistan24) – Turkish police detained on Monday the Deputy Co-chair of the pro-Kurdish opposition Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) Aysel Tugluk in a raid on her house in Ankara.

Authorities were investigating Tugluk in a probe related to the Diyarbakir-headquartered Democratic Society Congress (DTK), revealed Kurdistan24’s Ankara Bureau.

Tugluk headed the DTK, an umbrella organization for Kurdish civic associations, since its foundation in 2007.

Five other people were also taken into custody in Diyarbakir in the same probe.

Among the arrested were the Deputy Co-chair of the Democratic Regions Party (DBP) Seydi Firat, HDP’s provincial leader Cabar Leygara, and three other officials of the DTK, said Kurdistan24 Diyarbakir.

After Tugluk’s arrest, the HDP, whose Co-leaders Selahattin Demirtas and Figen Yuksekdag remain in pre-trial imprisonment since November, said on its website “no legal procedures” were being actuated in Turkey anymore.

The HDP called the clampdown on its members, including 10 other lawmakers, a “coup in the Parliament.”

Tugluk had served two times as an MP and was also the Co-chair of the Democratic Society Party (DTP) banned in 2009 by Turkey’s Constitutional Court.

The court expelled the DTP for being “the focal point of activities against the indivisible unity of the state, the country, and the nation.”

Moreover, the court convicted the DTP of having ties with the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).

They also ordered a ban of doing politics on Tugluk and the party’s other chair Ahmet Turk, a veteran Kurdish politician and Co-mayor of the city of Mardin Turkey had jailed last month.

Editing by Karzan Sulaivany