Police arrested more than 400 people in Istanbul on Thursday, with parts of Turkey’s biggest city paralysed in a bid to prevent May Day demonstrations, a lawyers group said.
On Wednesday city authorities closed metro, bus and ferry services in the metropolis and arrested 100 people who were allegedly planning to protest in the city’s central Taksim Square, where demonstrations have been banned since 2013.
This year’s May Day comes as the government is embroiled in a showdown with the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CPH), following the detention of its presidential candidate Ekrem Imamoglu.
Imamoglu, who is Istanbul’s mayor, is the biggest political rival of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
“The number of arrests that have been reported to us exceeds 400,” the Istanbul branch of the CHD lawyers group wrote on X on Thursday.
There was no immediate comment on the detentions from city authorities.
AFP journalists witnessed several dozen people arrested in neighbourhoods on the European side of the city.
Several thousand people assembled in sanctioned protests called by labour unions on the Asian side of the city, according to local media and an AFP journalist.
On Wednesday, rights group Amnesty International urged Turkey to lift the ban on demonstrations in Taksim.
“The restrictions on May Day celebrations in Taksim Square are based on entirely spurious security and public order grounds and… must be urgently lifted,” said Dinushika Dissanayake, an Amnesty’s specialist on Europe.
As happens every year, the square has been sealed off with metal barriers for several days, with a heavy police presence.
