Selim Sadak, a former member of the Turkish Parliament from the ranks of a now-closed Kurdish political party, was detained by police in the southeastern province of Diyarbakır on Thursday, Turkish media reports said.
Sadak, who is currently an executive board member of the Democratic Society Congress (DTK), the umbrella group of the Kurdish political movement, was detained at the Diyarbakır Courthouse where he went to on Thursday to testify as part of an investigation.
It was not immediately clear on what charges the Kurdish politician was detained, but Turkey accuses most Kurdish politicians of having links to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a terrorist organization that has waged a bloody war in Turkey’s Southeast since 1984.
Sadak’s house was among those raided as part of simultaneous police operations across 20 provinces launched on Monday after the removal of three elected Kurdish mayors from their posts by the Turkish government.
In a controversial move on Monday, the Interior Ministry removed the mayors of Mardin, Van and Diyarbakır in southeastern Turkey, claiming they had links to the PKK. The mayors were elected from the Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) in the March 31 local elections.