A few days before the presidential election in Turkey, several Turkish members of the opposition YSP party, living in the Lyon region, said on Thursday that they had filed a complaint after being “attacked” during the remote vote reserved for foreign nationals. Four people, at least, would have been victims of violence, Tuesday evening, in front of the office of Décines. An investigation “is in progress”, indicates the police to AFP, confirming to have registered three complaints.
According to the YSP (Yesil Sol Party, Green Left Party), a “group of ultranationalists attacked the assessors and representatives” of the party by “attacking them at the exit of the polling station” around 10 p.m.
Blows to the head and back
Tuna Altinel, teacher-researcher at Lyon-1 University who had been detained for two years in his native country, is one of the victims. In a press release, he explains that he was “attacked by men from a crowd of around forty people chanting the name of Erdogan and the AKP”. “We were hit in the head, in the back. Injuries require two to five days of ITT,” he says.
The facts covered by the three complaints occurred, according to him, on the site of the DITIB association, dependent on the Turkish ministry of worship, in Décines (Rhône), in the suburbs of Lyon, where the vote took place in an adjoining room. of the mosque. “All this would not have happened if the vote had been organized in neutral premises, rather than in the complex of the DITIB (association dependent on the Turkish Ministry of Worship), whose members tried to intimidate us. And these intimidations lead to violence, ”said the mathematician.
Some 3.4 million Turkish voters are registered abroad, including nearly 400,000 in France according to the state agency Anadolu. Polling stations closed Tuesday evening. Incidents also took place in Marseilles and Amsterdam.