Ilkay Çiçek, the mayor of Menderes district in the western city of Izmir from the opposition Republican People's Party (CHP), was among 13 suspects detained on Tuesday on charges of bribery, corruption, abuse of office and forgery of official documents.
The Chief Prosecutor's Office in Türkiye's third-largest city announced that the detentions were part of an investigation into allegations that municipal officials accepted bribes in exchange for building and zoning permits.
Security forces launched operations in Izmir's Menderes, Karabağlar and Konak districts to apprehend 16 wanted suspects. Three other suspects, including Menderes' deputy mayor, a municipal assembly member and a former municipal bureaucrat, remain at large.
Çiçek was elected mayor of the small Aegean coastal district in the 2024 municipal elections, replacing another CHP mayor in a district that has been a stronghold of the opposition party for years.
Dozens of CHP mayors have been the subject of criminal investigations, and many have been detained or arrested on corruption charges, along with a sizeable number of municipal bureaucrats. The alleged web of corruption, as the CHP's rivals describe it, often involves accusations that mayors and municipal staff accepted bribes in exchange for granting permits that otherwise would not have been approved and awarding lucrative municipal tenders to businesses with ties to municipal officials or those that paid bribes to mayors and bureaucrats.
