Turkish police have detained 120 former and current municipal officials in the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) bastion of İzmir, including the city’s former mayor, local media and the CHP said on Tuesday, Agence France-Presse reported.
The detentions, on accusations of corruption, came after a similar operation in opposition-run İstanbul on March 19 that saw the arrest of its popular mayor, Ekrem İmamoğlu, the main political rival of Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
In İzmir, Turkey’s third-largest city that the opposition has run for years, a former mayor and numerous “senior officials” were among those detained, Murat Bakan, the vice chair of the CHP, wrote on X.
In total, some 157 detention warrants were issued in the operation, local media reported.
“We are faced with a process similar to that in İstanbul,” Bakan wrote, adding that Tunc Soyer, a former mayor, and Şenol Aslanoğlu, the party’s regional president, were among those detained.
“These dawn detentions were not a legal obligation, but a clear political choice,” Bakan wrote, saying that many of those detained had already been under investigation.
“If they had been called to testify, they would have done so,” he said.
