A Turkish lawyer on Tuesday claimed he was beaten by bodyguards of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan after he objected to the president’s security detail holding up traffic, the Cumhuriyet daily reported.
Erdoğan on Sunday attended the wedding of a young couple from Turkey’s wealthy Demirören and Kalyon families at the Çırağan Palace hotel in İstanbul.
The lawyer, Sertuğ Sürenoğlu, was on a bus trying to get home when the traffic became gridlocked due to road closures to make way for Erdoğan’s convoy.
As the bus was stuck in traffic for a while, Sürenoğlu complained about the situation to police officers.
According to the report, some of Erdoğan’s bodyguards were in the vicinity and forced Sürenoğlu into a vehicle, where they tied his hands from behind and beat him for two hours.
Later they forced him to sign a statement saying he had insulted President Erdoğan.
After he signed the document, they handed him over the police for formal detention, after which he was put under house arrest by an İstanbul court, although he told the prosecutor what he had experienced.
The Ankara Bar Association filed a criminal complaint against the bodyguards, and an opposition deputy brought the incident to parliament, posing a question to Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu.