A senior İstanbul municipal official jailed in Turkey’s prosecution of the opposition-run city government told a court that police repeatedly filmed him being escorted into their headquarters after he had surrendered voluntarily, producing images he said were later used to portray him as a fugitive who had been caught.
Buğra Gökce, head of the İstanbul Planning Agency and a former deputy secretary-general of the İstanbul Metropolitan Municipality, described the alleged staging Tuesday during his first defense statement since his detention 15 months ago.
Gökce said he went to İstanbul police headquarters on his own after learning through news reports that authorities were seeking him in the March 2025 operation targeting İstanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu and other municipal officials.
“I entered police headquarters normally,” Gökce told the court. “I was not someone brought there under police escort or by force. I went there on my own.”
Gökce said officers later removed him from the premises and told him they needed to photograph him entering the building.
“They told me, ‘We will take a photo. We will go outside again,’” he said.
Gökce said officers escorted him back into the building while someone recorded the entrance. He was then returned to his cell before officers took him outside again because the first recording had been made vertically.
“They said, ‘The first one did not work. We shot it vertically. We need to shoot it horizontally. We will do it again,’” Gökce said.
He said the process resulted in him being filmed entering the police building under escort three times.
The images were later circulated with reports saying Gökce had been “caught,” he said, creating the impression that police had apprehended a fugitive rather than accepting a voluntary surrender.
Gökce called the episode an attempt to damage his reputation before he had appeared before a judge.
“This was not a legal procedure but a process of producing images,” he said.
Gökce had publicly disputed the account of his capture at the time.
In a statement posted March 22, 2025, he said officers had not visited his home or his workplace and had not served him with a detention warrant. He said he went to police headquarters with his lawyer after seeing reports that authorities were looking for him.
“Some media organizations are using misleading and manipulative language claiming that I was ‘caught,’” Gökce said in the statement.
A court ordered his pretrial detention the following day.
Ömer Faruk Gergerlioğlu, a lawmaker from the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party (DEM Party), submitted separate parliamentary questions to Turkey’s interior and justice ministers following Gökce’s court testimony.
Gergerlioğlu asked whether police had taken Gökce outside and brought him back into the building to create the appearance of an arrest and what law or police regulation authorized such a procedure.
He also asked why the recording was repeated because of its horizontal or vertical format, whether the officers involved would face an investigation and whether officials checked the context of police footage before providing it to the media.
Gergerlioğlu said presenting a person who surrendered as someone captured by police could violate the presumption of innocence and the right to protection from unfounded public suspicion.
Gökce made his defense on the 51st day of hearings in the main İstanbul Metropolitan Municipality case, in which 414 defendants are standing trial, 68 of whom are in pretrial detention.
The defendants include İmamoğlu, the jailed mayor of Turkey’s largest city and the presidential candidate selected by the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP).
Prosecutors accuse İmamoğlu of leading a criminal organization that used municipal contracts and other city operations for bribery, fraud, bid rigging and money laundering.
İmamoğlu and the other defendants deny the accusations. They say the case was constructed to remove President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s strongest electoral rival and dismantle the municipal administration elected by İstanbul voters.
Gökce also denied charges of membership in a criminal organization and aggravated fraud involving municipal transactions.
He said he was initially jailed on suspicion of bribery although the indictment does not charge him with bribery. He said the indictment contains no accusation concerning his work at the İstanbul Planning Agency and relies instead on administrative decisions from his 17 months as a municipal deputy secretary-general.
Gökce said the indictment treated opposing procurement decisions as criminal, accusing municipal officials both when they combined work in a single tender and when they divided it into separate tenders.
“The indictment tells me, ‘Whatever you do is a crime,’” he said.
Gökce also cited municipal revenue figures to dispute allegations that his decisions caused financial losses.
He said the municipality collected about 468 million Turkish lira from rent and unauthorized occupancy charges between 2014 and 2019, compared with 4.5 billion lira between 2020 and 2025.
“There is no public loss,” he said. “On the contrary, there is a serious increase in public revenue.”