Adnan Selçuk Mızraklı is a general surgeon. He trained at Hacettepe medical faculty, practised in Diyarbakır from the early 1990s, and led the city’s Medical Chamber from 2008 to 2010. He was elected an HDP member of parliament in 2018, and in the local elections of 31 March 2019 was elected co-mayor of Diyarbakır Metropolitan Municipality with more than 62 percent of the vote.

He held office for four months. On 19 August 2019 the Interior Ministry removed him and appointed a government trustee in his place, alongside the mayors of Van and Mardin. He was detained on 21 October and arrested the following day.

In March 2020 he was sentenced to nine years, four months and 15 days for membership of a terrorist organisation. Human Rights Watch found the evidence in his indictment did not support either a terrorism connection or the commission of a crime. In 2023, bianet reported that the witness whose statement led to his arrest was a serving police officer.

In December 2022 the Court of Cassation quashed the conviction, citing incomplete examination and insufficient reasoning. It refused to release him. At retrial the same court imposed the same sentence again, in November 2023. The Court of Cassation upheld it in October 2024.

In a separate case, prosecutors treated his attendance at party meetings and his campaigning against an execution in Iran as terrorist propaganda. He was acquitted in September 2021.

In 2025 the prison board refused his transfer to an open prison and refused him supervised release. He served the sentence to its end and walked out of Edirne F-type high security prison on 8 September 2026. His lawyers stated plainly that the release had nothing to do with the current political process.

The cell

In February 2022 Mızraklı asked to be moved to Edirne, where Selahattin Demirtaş has been held since 2016. They shared a cell for roughly five years.

It was Demirtaş who announced the release, in a letter sent out through his lawyers. He described the two of them as having been in each other’s keeping for five years, and closed by telling the outside world that Mızraklı was now in theirs. He described the sentence as seven years without guilt, without evidence, without law.

Mızraklı’s first words outside the prison were about the man he had left inside. Demirtaş, he said, should have been there before him. He said he wanted to return to Edirne as soon as possible — for Demirtaş’s release. He called for Turkey to return to law, and said that what defines the period since 2015 is the departure from it.

Demirtaş has now been imprisoned for close to ten years. In December 2020 the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights ordered his immediate release, finding that his detention pursued the ulterior purpose of stifling pluralism. He is still inside.

A doctor elected by his city with 62 percent of the vote served every day of a sentence that his own supreme court once found unsustainable. The peace process now under way did not shorten it by a day.