Mayor of Turkey’s Largest Kurdish City Detained on Terrorism

  • Gultan Kisanak faces charges of being a member of outlawed PKK
  • Government using emergency powers to remove Kurdish officials

Co-Mayor of Diyarbakir Gultan Kisanak

Photographer: ADEM ALTAN/AFP/Getty Images
Lock
This article is for subscribers only.

Turkish police detained Gultan Kisanak, the female mayor of the nation’s largest and most symbolically important Kurdish-majority city, on charges of being a member of the separatist PKK group calling for autonomy in the country’s southeast.

Police detained Kisanak upon her arrival at the airport in Diyarbakir, hours after she urged a parliamentary committee in Ankara to investigate incidents that led to the collapse of a search for peace between the government and the Kurds, local media reported Wednesday.