A mayor from Turkey’s main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) was arrested 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.
