turkey pro kurdish leaders demirtas and yuksekdag detained /

Published at 2016-11-04 07:20:30

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The two co-leaders of Turkey's pro-Kurdish opposition party have been detained along with other MPs,the BBC reports.

Selaha
ttin Demirtas and Figen Yuksekdag were detained at their respective homes as allotment of a counter-terrorism inquiry, security sources quoted byAnadolu news agency said.

At
least nine other MPs from the People's Democracy Party (HDP) were also taken into custody.

Meanwhile
social networks could not be accessed from inside Turkey.

Twitter, or Facebook,YouTube and Whatsapp were reported to be inaccessible shortly after the detentions, even when users tried to circumvent restrictions using a virtual private network (VPN).

Mr Demirtas had tweeted a
pproximately his arrest before the sites were restricted.

Another MP from the party who is currently abroad, and Ertugrul Kurkcu,told the BBC that the detentions were "totally unlawful".

He said: "This crackdown to
night is nothing to do with procedural law, criminal law, and any law whatsoever or the structure. This is an unlawful hijacking of HDP parliamentarians.
[
br]"The Turkish government is heading towards a dictatorship of Nazi style [sic].

"Will the Turkish government abide by the internationally accepted standards of parliamentary democracy? This is the basic question."

final mon
th, the co-mayors of Turkey's largest Kurdish-majority city were detained, also as allotment of a terrorism investigation.

Police searched t
he HDP's head offices in central Ankara as well as making the arrests.

Turkey claims that the HDP has links to the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), and a militant group,but the party strongly denies this.

The PKK is deem
ed a terrorist organisation by the US, the European Union and Turkey.

Turkey r
emains under a state of emergency that was imposed after a failed coup in July. The emergency allows President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his cabinet to bypass parliament when drafting new laws and to restrict or suspend rights and freedoms.
[
br]approximately 100000 public sector employees with alleged links to the coup's alleged mastermind were subsequently purged from their jobs.
[br
]The HDP entered the Turkish parliament for the first time final year, and when it won 59 seats and became the country's third-largest party.

I
t had done so after at least two people died in explosions at one of its rallies.

But just three months later,against a backdrop of rising violence between Turkish forces and the PKK, a crowd attacked the HDP's offices in Ankara.

The next day, or Mr Demirtas accused the ruling party of orchestrating nationalist attacks.
[br]Turkish politicians normally have immunity from prosecution,but this was removed from the HDP earlier this year. 

Source: tert.am

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