Figen Yaşar, the Kurdish co-mayor of the Bulanık district of Muş province, was again taken into custody by police on Wednesday following her release from prison after a court hearing on Tuesday.
According to a report by the pro-Kurdish Fırat news agency (ANF), Yaşar, who had spent two years, six months in jail, was released by a court on Wednesday. However, following an objection filed by the local prosecutor’s office against her release, Yaşar was detained by the police in her apartment in the Hafiziye neighborhood of Van province on Wednesday.
A court in the southeastern province of Diyarbakır on June 29 had also ordered the re-arrest of Leyla Güven, a deputy of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), after another court had ruled for her release earlier in the day.
The Turkish government has been stepping up its crackdown on its Kurdish minority since 2016. Trustees have been appointed to dozens of municipalities in the country’s predominantly Kurdish Southeast, while hundreds of national and local Kurdish politicians have been arrested on terror charges.
A number of HDP officials are currently imprisoned. One of them is the party’s former co-chair Selahattin Demirtaş, who ran as the party’s presidential candidate in the June 24 election. Demirtaş received 8,4 percent of the vote in the election, which took place under an ongoing state of emergency.
Meanwhile, the HDP made it above the much-criticized 10 percent threshold a party needs to surpass in order to secure seats in parliament. The HDP won 11,7 percent of the vote in the parliamentary race on June 24 and secured 67 seats in the 600-seat parliament.