Mustafa Bozbey, Mayor of Turkey’s fourth-largest city, Bursa, from the main opposition Republican People’s Party, CHP, and 54 others have been detained by Turkish police for allegedly “forming a crime group”, prosecutors announced on Tuesday.
They are alleged to have been “involved in the crimes of Establishing an Organisation for the Purpose of Committing Crimes, Being a Member of an Organisation Established for the Purpose of Committing Crimes, and Laundering Assets Derived from Crime”, according to Bursa’s Public Prosecutor’s Office.
Other detainees include Bozbey’s wife, daughter, other family members, municipal officials, businesspeople and others.
The CHP condemned the police operation and accused the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of trying to silence critics with court decisions.
“You are trying to seize power through the judiciary that the people did not grant [you] at the ballot box. These detentions targeting elected mayors of the CHP will not intimidate anyone. They will never intimidate us,” Gokhan Zeybek, Deputy President of the CHP, wrote on X on Tuesday.
Bursa, with a population of 3.2 million, is one of the oldest cities in Turkey and a former capital of the Ottoman Empire.
The agricultural and industrial centre, located 155 km south of Istanbul on the coast of the Marmara Sea, has traditionally been considered a conservative stronghold, but the CHP won the local elections there in 2024, dealing a major blow to the Erdogan government.
Over the last year, dozens of CHP mayors and hundreds of party members have been arrested on corruption and terror charges. Those include the arrest of Istanbul’s Mayor and opposition presidential candidate Ekrem Imamoglu on March 19, 2025. The prosecutor’s office is demanding a 2,352-year prison sentence for him. The CHP denies all the accusations.
Opposition politicians, rights groups and international organisations have said that Erdogan’s government is using the judiciary to crush political rivals in what they describe as an unprecedented crackdown.