Turkey’s interior minister has announced that more than 1,800 people have been detained and 260 have been put in pretrial detention for participating in protests that erupted after İstanbul’s popular mayor, Ekrem İmamoğlu, was taken into custody last week.
Minister Ali Yerlikaya announced at a news conference in Ankara on Thursday that a total of 1,879 people have been detained since March 19, when İmamoğlu, from the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), and dozens of others were detained as part of two investigations launched by the İstanbul Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office involving alleged corruption and terrorism.
The minister said 468 of the protestors were released from custody under judicial supervision, 489 were released without conditions and that the questioning of 662 others was continuing. He claimed the detainees included suspects from 12 different terrorist organizations and that some of them had faced investigations on charges of fraud, causing injury, sexual harassment theft and drug use.
Yerlikaya called the protests “illegal” and suggested the protestors seek justice in courtrooms, not in the streets.
Levent Dölek, an academic at İstanbul University, was among the arrestees. He announced on X that he was referred to court without testifying to a prosecutor and was subsequently arrested, the Birgün daily reported.
Among the detainees is also prominent human rights activist Veli Saçılık, who was among 22 people detained at home in Ankara on Thursday morning, as well as three members of the Workers’ Party of Turkey (TİP), according to Turkish media reports.
Meanwhile, 30 people were also detained across İstanbul on Thursday on accusations of sharing “provocative” content on social media and calling on people to take to the streets to protest İmamoğlu’s arrest. The suspects were taken to the İstanbul Police Department for questioning.
The arrest of İmamoğlu, seen as the strongest political rival of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has sparked nights of street protests on a scale unseen in Turkey since 2013 and widespread condemnation from Europe, the UN and other international organizations.
Erdoğan has repeatedly denounced the protests as “street terror” and has stepped up his attacks on the CHP and its leader, Özgür Özel.