More arrests, imprisonments ensue in Turkey clampdown on Kurdish politicians
Turkish authorities arrested and imprisoned more local Kurdish politicians on Friday in an ongoing government crackdown.
ERBIL, Kurdistan Region (Kurdistan24) - Turkish authorities arrested and imprisoned more local Kurdish politicians on Friday in an ongoing government crackdown on the country's second largest opposition block, Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) and its surrogate Democratic Regions Party (BDP).
In Sanliurfa province on the border with Syrian Kurdistan (Rojava), Turkey's anti-terror police units raided the Municipality of Halfeti in the morning after arresting the town's elected co-mayor Mustafa Bayram in his house.
Police acting on a terror-related probe conducted a search and confiscated dossiers as well as computers, as they detained 16 municipal workers and other elected officials, reported Kurdistan24 Diyarbakir bureau.
The people of Halfeti (Xelfetî in Kurdish) chose Bayram and Ayse Durmus of the DBP with 58 percent of votes as their co-mayors in the 2014 local elections.
Halfeti, on the eastern bank of the River Euphrates, is the birthplace of the jailed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) founder, Abdullah Ocalan.
In the neighboring province of Mardin, a local court in Kiziltepe decided to remand the district's co-mayors Ismail Asi and Leyla Salman who were arrested on November 25.
Asi and Salman, whose arrest followed the last month imprisonment of Mardin’s Provincial Mayor Ahmet Turk, were elected with 60 percent of votes in the 2014 local elections.
Toward the evening, up north in the Kars Province on the Turkey-Armenia border, police detained Kemal Avci and Ali Bag, the local heads of the HDP and DBP respectively in house raids in the town of Kagizman.
Private-owned Dogan news agency said five other party officials were among the detained accused of disseminating propaganda on behalf of and membership in the PKK.
HDP was the first party with 44 percent of votes, winning two of the three lawmakers from the Kars Province in the June 2015 general elections.
Five months later, in the snap elections of November, HDP votes saw a ten percent erosion as it lost one lawmaker to the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) which got 35 percent.
The latest string of arrests followed last month's imprisonment of the HDP co-chairs Selahattin Demirtas and Figen Yuksekdag alongside eight other lawmakers representing various Kurdish-majority provinces.
Editing by Ava Homa