Istanbul: Turkey arrested two MPs from the main pro-Kurdish party yesterday, including its chief spokesman, the latest move in a crackdown on the group ahead of a vote on changing the constitution.
Ayhan Bilgen -- spokesman for the Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) and an MP representing the eastern province of Kars -- was remanded in custody ahead of trial after he was detained by police at an Ankara airport on Sunday and taken to the Kurdish-majority city of Diyarbakir in the southeast.
The state-run Anadolu news agency reported that he was arrested on charges of "membership in an armed terror organisation."
Another prominent HDP lawmaker, its legal expert Meral Danis Bestas, was also placed under arrest after being detained at her home in Diyarbakir. But the party said Bilgen's arrest was meant to prevent the HDP from campaigning against constitutional changes that would dramatically expand President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's powers in a referendum set for April.
"The arrest of our party spokesman Ayhan Bilgen is to block our referendum work but you cannot turn down the volume of 'NO,'" the HDP wrote on its Twitter account.
The arrests raised the number of HDP MPs behind bars on terror charges to 12, including the party's co-chairs Selahattin Demirtas and Figen Yuksekdag. The party holds 59 of the 550 seats in parliament.
Bilgen had become the public face of the party in the absence of the co-leaders. Turkish prosecutors are demanding up to 142 years in prison for Demirtas on charges of links to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which has waged a bloody insurgency against the Turkish state since 1984.
