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Turkish authorities have arrested 18 employees of the Istanbul municipality on corruption charges, days after detaining more than 50 others in a broadening legal crackdown against the city’s jailed mayor and star opposition politician Ekrem İmamoğlu.
İmamoğlu, who polls show would beat President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in an election, was jailed last month pending a trial over charges of corruption and aiding a terrorist group.
His arrest sparked financial market turmoil, Turkey’s biggest street protests in more than a decade and accusations that the government had politicised the judiciary.
State-run news agency Anadolu said 34 of the 52 people who were detained over the weekend were released. Among those caught up in the latest sweep of detainees were Cevat Kaya, the brother of İmamoğlu’s wife, as well as the wife of one of his aides.
The breadth of the crackdown has evoked some of the more severe periods of political repression in Erdoğan’s more than two decades in power. It has been decried by critics as a sign of his darkening authoritarianism and a clear indication that he has no intention of yielding power to his opponents.
İmamoğlu, who has denied all charges, said via social media that the people detained had done nothing wrong and he called on citizens to battle “those rotting our state”.
He has also claimed that the crackdown is partly motivated by his long-held opposition to a government plan to dig a 45km canal that would forge a new passage between the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara north-west of Istanbul.
Erdoğan has said the project — which he proposed more than a decade ago and would also involve building thousands of new houses along the waterway — is needed to rescue the Bosphorus strait, one of the world’s busiest chokepoints for tankers. But even Erdoğan has called it a “crazy” idea, and the project has faced stiff environmental opposition.
Alongside İmamoğlu is a disparate list of individuals who are also being investigated in a crackdown that goes far beyond the Istanbul mayoralty and the main opposition Republican People’s party (CHP) to which the mayor belongs.
Police this year have targeted Ömer Aras — a top figure in Tüsi̇ad, the country’s largest business association — for criticising government policies, and arrested celebrity talent manager Ayşe Barım for her alleged role in anti-government protests in 2013.
Barım was officially charged this week with aiding and abetting attempts to overthrow the government during the 2013 Gezi park riots — a charge that could land her in jail for more than 22 years.
Ümit Özdağ, chair of the rightwing and ultranationalist Victory party, also had a preliminary court hearing on Monday for allegedly insulting the president during a January rally, in which he said Turkey had been harmed more during the Justice and Development party’s more than two decades years in power “than by any Crusade in history”. He denied the charges.
The government has rejected claims that it has sought to influence the judiciary. But insofar as İmamoğlu’s case is concerned, in one recent poll, 65 per cent of respondents said they believed İmamoğlu’s arrest was wrong and 61 per cent thought it was a ploy to stop him being elected president.
