The trial over the allegations against Semra Güzel, a lawmaker of Turkey’s pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) will start on 19 December, Artı Gerçek reported.
Güzel was arrested in September after she was stripped of her parliamentary immunity to prosecution in March over a photograph showing the deputy with a fighter from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Her colleagues in the HDP say Güzel’s arrest had been co-ordinated by Turkey’s Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu and pro-government journalists to play out as a media spectacle.
The indictment accepted by a high criminal court in Ankara includes the testimony of an anonymous witness who in 2018 talked to the prosecutors in the south-eastern province of Diyarbakır and made allegations against Güzel. The lawmaker, a medical doctor by profession, was elected to parliament in June 2018.
“They have conducted an investigation that they tried to fill with testimonies of anonymous witnesses as well as certain photographs,” the lawmaker said during her testimony in court in September.
The indictment against Güzel is also heavily based on her photograph with her fiancé taken in a PKK camp in northern Iraq in 2014, during a peace process between the Turkish state and the PKK, a time when visits of Kurdish MPs to PKK headquarters in northern Iraq was common, mainly as a result of formal requests made by Turkish authorities.
