Protesters gather as mayor jailed in graft probe

Istanbul's embattled Ekrem Imamoglu vowed to fight on despite being suspended as mayor and jailed on Sunday, in developments that have sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade.

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Addressing vast crowds of tens of thousands of protesters who gathered outside City Hall for a fifth straight evening, Mr Imamoglu’s wife warned the authorities they would face a reckoning.

“He will defeat you!... you will lose!” Dilek Kaya Imamoglu shouted from the platform.

“The injustice Ekrem faced...it struck a chord with every conscience. Everyone found something of themselves and the injustices they faced in what was done to Ekrem,’ she said.

Just four days after his arrest in a pre-dawn raid by hundreds of police, the powerful and popular opposition mayor was on Sunday stripped of his title and shipped off to Silivri prison on the megacity’s western outskirts.

“This is not a judicial procedure, it’s a [political] execution without trial,” he wrote on X in a message through his lawyers.