May 1 demonstrator detained for taking off clothes during police search

İZMİR - Doğan News Agency

DHA photo

Police detained one demonstrator on May 3 as part of a legal process initiated against a group of demonstrators who took off their clothes during a police body search as they were entering the May 1 celebration area in the Aegean province of İzmir.

The demonstrator, identified as F.K., was detained to be interrogated as he was suspected of committing “exhibitionism” during the group’s demonstration on May 1. F.K. will be freed after his interrogation, police said, adding that four other demonstrators were also going to be detained. 

Police had previously said images of demonstrators entering the area without their clothes were being gathered and legal actions would be taken against two women who were completely topless and three men who wore only their underwear for alleged “exhibitionism” charges. 

Saying that the group’s entrance to the area was permitted to avoid a stampede and any possible reactions that might emerge at the time of the incident, İzmir Police Chief Celal Uzunkaya added that “proceedings based on penal and misdemeanor codes will be made for each one of these” five demonstrators. 

During the May 1 celebrations in İzmir, a group of 25 people who identified themselves as “anarchists” took for their clothing when entering the celebration area to protest the police’s insistence on conducting body searches at the entrances and to show their belief that “police cannot provide their security,” citing previous gatherings which became the scene of deadly terrorist attacks, such as in the capital Ankara and the southeastern cities of Suruç and Diyarbakır. 

“We weren’t only taking off our clothes. We were taking off the many identities - ethnic, religious, gender and biological - that the system forces us to wear,” read a statement made by the group later. 

“We witnessed the irrelevance of security justifications in the massacres in Ankara and Suruç, so we don’t believe the police can provide our security,” said the statement.