Turkey detains pro-Kurdish MPs in ongoing crackdown

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region (Kurdistan24) – Turkish authorities on Saturday detained two more pro-Kurdish lawmakers in an ongoing crackdown on the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), only to release both later in the evening.

Police arrested MP Huda Kaya of the HDP in the western Turkish city of Afyon after midnight and took her to the coastal city of Izmir to send her to Diyarbakir where a prosecutor would interrogate her.

Around the same time, police raided the home of HDP Deputy Co-chair Meral Danis Bestas in Diyarbakir.

Both MPs were tried in terrorism-related cases.

“Police are at my house,” Bestas tweeted before getting arrested.

Kaya was held at Izmir’s Adnan Menderes Airport for 12 hours because of severe weather conditions preventing flights, reported the private-owned Dogan news agency.

Kaya was previously arrested then released in December 2016.

HDP’s Spokesperson Ayhan Bilgen said on Twitter that Kaya was handcuffed, criticizing the government for its treatment of his party’s MPs.

“The rulers changed, but Huda Kaya’s handcuffs did not change,” Bilgen tweeted.

The Spokesperson was referring to Kaya’s detention and trial with a death sentence by an army-allied government for her activism and advocacy of hijab-wearing religious Muslim students’ right to study in the aftermath of the 1997 Turkish post-modern coup.

A Kurdistan24 correspondent in Diyarbakir said the public prosecutor’s office decided to release Bestas with a travel ban to abroad after her interrogation in the morning.

Meanwhile, Kaya was taken to a Diyarbakir courthouse where no journalists or her fellow lawmakers were allowed to see her, added the correspondent.

MP Sibel Yigitalp of Diyarbakir announced Kaya’s release in the evening on Twitter. 

Latest detentions followed a Friday arrest warrant by a court in the Kurdish city of Van for two other HDP lawmakers Adem Geveri and Lezgin Botan.

In November 2016, a prosecutor in Van demanded an aggravated life sentence for Geveri on charges of separatism and being a member of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).

The crackdown on HDP began in early November with the arrests and subsequent pre-trial imprisonment of the party’s Co-chairs Selahattin Demirtas, Figen Yuksekdag, and a dozen other MPs of whom 10 remain in jail.

Editing by Karzan Sulaivany