Turkey releases two pro-Kurdish lawmakers

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region (Kurdistan24) – A Turkish heavy penal court in the Kurdish city of Diyarbakir released two pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) lawmakers on Friday pending trial and with a ban on leaving the country.

Prosecutors were charging both Meral Danis Bestas and Nursel Aydogan with terror-related accusations, said Kurdistan24’s bureau in Diyarbakir.

Bestas who represents the southern Mediterranean province of Adana, where a sizeable Kurdish population resides, is a deputy leader at HDP.

An indictment against Bestas who was being held in an Istanbul prison demanded a prison sentence of up to 23 years for “membership in a terror group.”

Police detained Bestas, a human rights lawyer by profession, in a January house raid in Diyarbakir.

She was also charged with “inciting people to commit crimes” during the Autumn 2014 deadly riots against the Turkish government over its perceived support for the Islamic State (IS) which had laid a siege to the Syrian Kurdish town of Kobani south of the Turkish border.

The other freed HDP MP, Aydogan, an ethnic Turk who represents Diyarbakir at the Turkish Parliament, was in January sentenced to four years, eight months in prison.

The prison sentence for Aydogan was the first conviction of a sitting member of parliament in decades in Turkey.

The release of the two pro-Kurdish lawmakers follows last week’s referendum over giving executive powers to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan who claimed a contested victory with 51.4 percent.

Still, charismatic HDP Co-leaders Selahattin Demirtas, Figen Yuksekdag, as well as nine other MPs along with 83 mayors remain in prison since the crackdown on Kurdish politicians began in November 2016.

Editing by Karzan Sulaivany