Türkiye This Monday a macro trial began against the former mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem Imamogluy 400 personas more, supposedly for having created a criminal organization with which they governed the great Turkish metropolis.
Imamoglu was detained in March last year, and his arrest sparked a huge wave of protests both in Istanbul as in the other large cities of the country. The former mayor of Istanbul is one of the leaders of the main Turkish opposition party, the Republican People’s Party (CHP)and is in fact the candidate of this formation for the next presidential elections, scheduled for two years from now.
Imamoglu, according to the vast majority of polls, would win these elections with a wide advantage over the current Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Erdogan has been in power since 2001.
Among the accusations of the Turkish Prosecutor’s Office against Imamoglu there is everything: the main ones – for which he was brought before the judge this Monday in the first hearing of his macro-trial – are for supposedly leading a corruption mafia criminal through the Istanbul City Hall, but there are many more. Alleged support and links with terrorist groupsfalsification of university diplomadefamation, insults to public officials, insults to citizens, embezzlement of public funds, espionage and corruption. In total, the politician 55 years — imprisoned in March of last year — faces a maximum of 2,400 years in prison.
Upon his arrival this Monday before the judge, the courtroom has exploded in cheersand the judge has momentarily postponed the session, after denying Imamoglu to speak. The trial, the most high-profile and important of the decade in Türkiye, has been surrounded by a huge security deviceand is expected to be long-lasting, given the large number of defendants.
“A ready-made sentence”
“This is not a trial. It is a ready-made sentence. We are before a court that the only thing that has come to do is to carry out the task that has been entrusted to them, and as a citizen of this country I am ashamed. I can’t find the words. How have they fallen so low?“said, after the first hearing and outside the courts, the leader of the CHP and the Turkish opposition, Özgür Özel.
Next March 19, as Türkiye and the Muslim world enters the festivities of end of Ramadanthe CHP is planning a possible repetition of the wave of protests that the Anatolian country experienced just a year ago, after the arrest, at dawn and in his home, of Imamoglu.
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