Co-Mayor Ayhan Bilgen arrested, trustee appointed to Kars Municipality

* Photo: Bilal Seçkin

Click to read the article in Turkish

After Kars Co-Mayor Ayhan Bilgen was arrested with 16 other Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) politicians earlier today (October 2) and Co-Mayor Şevin Alaca was taken into custody and removed from office yesterday, a trustee has been appointed to the municipality in Turkey's Kurdish-majority eastern province of Kars. The Ministry of Interior has appointed Kars Governor Türker Öksüz as the Acting Mayor of Kars.

CLICK - Detained Kars Mayor Ayhan Bilgen announces resignation

Taken into custody on September 25 as part of the "Kobani investigation" launched by the Ankara Chief Public Prosecutor's Office, Ayhan Bilgen was arrested by the judgeship of peace this morning.

While he was still in detention, Ayhan Bilgen made a statement via his attorneys and announced that "if no trustee was appointed until the end of his detention period, he would resign from office as the Kars Mayor."

As part of an operation against the HDP politicians in Kars, Şevin Alaca, the other Co-Mayor of the province, was taken into custody in a house raid yesterday morning. Alaca and six municipality personnel were removed from office by the Ministry of Interior yesterday.

Trustee appointed to 48 municipalities

In the last local elections in Turkey on March 31, 2019, the HDP won 65 municipalities in total; while three of them were metropolitan municipalities (Van, Diyarbakır and Mardin), five of them were provincial municipalities, 45 were district municipalities and 12 were town municipalities.

With the recent appointment of a trustee to the Kars Municipality, the number of HDP's trustee-appointed municipalities has increased to 48.

Six elected mayors from the party were also not given their certificates of election after March 31, 2019 on the grounds that they had been dismissed from public service by Statutory Decrees. (RT/SD)