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Friends and supporters of the accused at the entrance to the courtroom of the prison complex and the Silivri courthouse on June 24, 2019, where civil society figures are judged for the anti-Erdogan protests of 2013. REUTERS / Huseyin Aldemir

While the opposition has just won a landslide victory in Istanbul's municipal election, the crackdown continues in the courts. A highly anticipated trial opened on Monday (June 24th): businessman Osman Kavala and 15 other civil society figures accused of attempting to overthrow the government at the time of the Gezi protests in 2013. this first day of hearing, which must continue on Tuesday, the defendants denounced an empty file and a political trial.

With our correspondent in Istanbul , Anne Andlauer

601 days, precisely after being placed in pretrial detention in an Istanbul prison, businessman and philanthropist Osman Kavala confronted his judges for the first time. Calmly, methodically, he denounced the allegations that presented him, over the 657 pages of the indictment, as the main organizer and financier of the Gezi Park protests of the summer of 2013. Indictment that he called " fantastic fiction ".

Osman Kavala pointed to one of the ironies of this trial: the bulk of the investigation, wiretapping, alleged evidence against him and his co-defendants were harvested by police and prosecutors jailed since for belonging to the networks Fethullah Gülen, the designated sponsor of the July 2016 coup attempt. But the 16 defendants in the Gezi trial are themselves suspected of having attempted a coup against Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

The Turkish president is number one on the list of 746 plaintiffs. The prosecutor requested life imprisonment for all the defendants.