Turkey arrests opposition mayor accused of being PKK member

A mayor from Turkey’s main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) was arrested late on Wednesday after prosecutors accused him of belonging to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), banned as a terrorist group in Turkey.

The arrest of Ahmet Ozer, mayor of Istanbul’s Esenyurt district, followed an attack on Turkish defense company TUSAS that killed five people in Ankara last week, a strike the PKK claimed responsibility for.

It also comes amid talk of a peace push by a close ally of President Tayyip Erdogan, the first bid in a decade to end Turkey’s 40-year conflict with Kurdish militants.

Ozer denies the terrorism-related charges he is accused of. The CHP said it would defend him against what it called unfounded allegations that it said reflected the latest government attempt to target the opposition through the courts, and urged people to protest in Esenyurt.

Erdogan’s government has denied similar accusations by the party in the past.

The CHP runs the Esenyurt municipality, which is one of the country’s biggest, with some 1 million residents, many of them immigrants.

Ozer, a sociology professor, is a former adviser to Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, a potential future presidential challenger to Erdogan who faces his own legal headwinds and has appealed a prison sentence and political ban.

“We see political interference in the judiciary. We know there’s a politically staged plot,” Imamoglu said on Wednesday, adding that the timing of the mayor’s arrest was puzzling given the peace proposal by Erdogan’s ally.

Aysegul Dogan, spokesperson for the pro-Kurdish DEM Party, parliament’s third-largest, condemned Ozer’s arrest and said he had been elected with its support. The arrest undermines the “democratic opposition”, she said.

The PKK has waged an insurgency in southeast Turkey for four decades, with more than 40,000 people killed in the conflict. Turkey’s Western allies also list it as a terrorist organization. [Reuters]