Deposed Mayor Mızraklı transferred to Edirne Prison

Kurdish politician and doctor Adnan Selçuk Mızraklı, who is imprisoned in Turkey, has been transferred to the high security prison in Edirne. The news was announced by the 59-year-old’s legal counsel in Amed (tr. Diyarbakır) on Friday. Mızraklı, who was transferred to a prison in the central Anatolian city of Kayseri shortly after his arrest in October 2019, will share a cell in Edirne with former HDP leader Selahattin Demirtaş. His long-time cellmate, Abdullah Zeydan, was surprisingly released at the beginning of January.

Adnan Selçuk Mızraklı was elected co-mayor of Amed city in the local elections in March 2019. In August of the same year, he was forcibly removed from the post at the instigation of the Turkish Interior Ministry and replaced by a pro-government governor in the town hall. The same scenario played out that day in the HDP strongholds of Van and Mardin. As a result, dozens of mayors of the HDP and its Kurdish sister party DBP were removed from their posts. Some of them are still in pre-trial detention.

Mızraklı, who worked as a doctor until his election as mayor and sat on the board of the Sarmaşık Food Bank, which was later banned by emergency decree, was sentenced to nine years, four months and 15 days imprisonment in March 2020 on the basis of the testimony of the key witness Hicran Berna Ayverdi under the pretext of alleged “membership in a terrorist organisation”. In July 2020, the sentence was confirmed in appeal proceedings. Another case against the politician for alleged terror propaganda is still pending.

In Edirne, Adnan Selçuk Mızraklı is currently still in a quarantine cell and is isolated from his fellow prisoners. According to the regulation currently in force in Turkey, quarantine and isolation will be terminated after fifteen days – however, the prerequisite for transfer to the communal cell is the receipt of a negative result from a PCR test or a certified antigen test.