Turkish opposition party CHP and local media said on Tuesday, July 1, that police arrested more than 120 city hall members at dawn in Izmir, an opposition stronghold.
The arrests were made on charges of alleged corruption. A similar crackdown was carried out in March in Istanbul, where the the chief rival of Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Ekrem İmamoğlu, the city’s mayor, was arrested.
In Izmir, Turkey’s third-largest city that the opposition has run for years, a former mayor and numerous “senior officials” were among those detained, Murat Bakan, the vice president of the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) wrote on X.
In total, some 157 arrest warrants were issued in the operation, local media reported.
“These dawn arrests were not a legal obligation, but a clear political choice,” Bakan wrote, saying that many of those detained had already been under investigation.
“If they had been called to testify, they would have done so,” he said
