Turkish prosecutors on Wednesday launched a new investigation into jailed İstanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s main political rival, accusing him of threatening a public official over remarks he made during his corruption trial.
The chief public prosecutor’s office in the Bakırköy district of İstanbul said it opened the investigation on its own initiative after İmamoğlu told the court, “I will not present a defense. I will judge,” adding that he would judge those who drafted the indictment.
The remarks came during a dispute between İmamoğlu and the presiding judge over the amount of time allotted for his defense in the İstanbul Metropolitan Municipality case, in which 414 people are standing trial, 59 of them in pretrial detention.
İmamoğlu was removed from the courtroom after the exchange, with the judge citing Article 203 of Turkey’s Code of Criminal Procedure, which allows a defendant to be expelled for disrupting the order of a hearing.
The hearing was held in a courtroom across from Marmara Prison in Silivri, west of İstanbul, where İmamoğlu has been jailed since March 2025.
İmamoğlu objected to what he described as a plan to force him to complete his defense by July 9, saying six or seven hours would not be enough to respond to an indictment seeking a prison sentence of up to 2,430 years.
“I did not come here to be questioned. I came to express my demands,” İmamoğlu said before the judge ordered his removal.
The judge told İmamoğlu that he had come to be tried, not to judge the court, before ordering gendarmes to remove him from the courtroom.
As he was being taken out, İmamoğlu accused officials in Ankara of trying to influence the proceedings and called the Justice Ministry “a ministry of collapse,” according to Turkish media reports.
His lawyers objected to the court’s handling of the hearing, saying his right to a defense had been restricted.
Tora Pekin, one of İmamoğlu’s lawyers, described the decision to remove him as arbitrary and unlawful.
Ousted main opposition Republican People’s Party’s (CHP) leader Özgür Özel, who attended the hearing in Silivri, called the trial “a sham” and accused the court of trying to cut short İmamoğlu’s defense.
“Even the worst courts in history tried to pretend to be courts,” Özel told reporters. “Here, they do not even have that concern.”
Özel was removed from the leadership of the CHP after a court annulled the party’s 2023 congress, citing alleged irregularities in the leadership vote, and reinstated former chairman Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu.
İmamoğlu was jailed in March 2025, the day he was nominated as the CHP’s candidate for the 2028 presidential election.
He denies leading what prosecutors describe as a criminal network inside the İstanbul Metropolitan Municipality.
The indictment accuses him of offenses including establishing a criminal organization, bribery, bid rigging, fraud against public institutions, money laundering, unlawfully obtaining personal data and environmental crimes.
İmamoğlu won another term as mayor in March 2024 in Turkey’s largest city, a victory that cemented his status as Erdoğan’s most serious electoral challenger.
His arrest, prosecution and suspension from office have prompted criticism from rights groups and opposition politicians, who say the case is meant to sideline him before the next presidential election.
With reporting by Agence France-Presse