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Chair of the left-wing parliamentary group in the Hamburg Parliament: Cansu Özdemir
Photo: Carsten Koall / dpa
What exactly happened when the Hamburg leftist Cansu Özdemir was prevented from leaving the Dusseldorf airport?
In any case, the information provided by the Federal Police does not match the information that the Federal Ministry of the Interior has now issued.
In mid-June, the federal police forbade 15 members of a "peace delegation" at Düsseldorf airport to travel to the Kurdish autonomous regions in Iraq.
Four other members of the delegation were not prohibited from doing so, but they missed the flight because of the control.
Among them was Özdemir, chairman of the left-wing parliamentary group in the Hamburg parliament.
The federal police announced on the same day that a group of 19 people had been checked.
»A member of the state parliament from Hamburg was also part of the group.
The mandate holder initially did not identify herself as a member of parliament.
She was allowed to travel on, ”it said.
It was expressly not about arrests, it was said by the federal police, but about "measures within the framework of the border police questioning".
The answer from the Ministry of the Interior to a written question from the left-wing member of the Bundestag, Niema Movassat, presents the incident differently. While the Federal Police speak of 19 people being checked, the answer says that the officers "did not question Özdemir, were in custody or even arrested" . Rather, the "person named in the question" was allowed to remain in the federal police station at their own request "until the end of the questioning of the other people," continues.
Özdemir contradicts both representations.
"The officials did not believe me that I was a member of parliament, which I told them at the beginning," she told SPIEGEL.
“If the Federal Police doesn't want me to be arrested, why did an officer have to accompany me to the toilet or outside to smoke?
That is completely absurd. ”The passport was also taken away from her, so she would not have been able to leave the country at all.
Criminal charges for deprivation of liberty and coercion announced
The case is considered a delicate one because, according to the Basic Law, elected MPs may neither be arrested nor hindered in their freedom and the exercise of their mandate in any other way.
Özdemir now wants to take legal action.
“This practice was illegal.
The freedom to travel and my work as a member of parliament were restricted, «she says.
"We will file charges for deprivation of liberty and coercion."
MP Movassat criticized the fact that the Federal Police had "made themselves the henchman of the Turkish regime" by detaining the delegation.
Now the Federal Ministry of the Interior is entangled in contradictions.
“First it was said by the federal police that my colleague Cansu Özdemir had not identified herself as a member of parliament.
Now suddenly it is said that she voluntarily stayed at the police station.
The Federal Ministry of the Interior must finally put all its cards on the table, ”says Movassat.
According to the Left Party, the delegation in northern Iraq wanted to find out more about Turkey's military actions.
The destination of the flight was Erbil, the capital of the region.
As activists announced, around 50 people were prevented from entering Erbil around the same time as the incident in Düsseldorf, including the Berlin left-wing MP Hakan Taş.
He was arrested in the security area of the airport after his arrival from Istanbul.
The Kurdish Ministry of the Interior informed the news agency dpa that the security and stability of Erbil was "a red line";
no one is allowed to endanger Erbil.
The Kurdish Workers' Party PKK tries through members and supporters to »organize events that would destabilize Erbil«.
The matter is now also fueling the inner-Kurdish conflict, because left activists accuse the Kurdish government of working with the Turkish government in its own interest.
This tries to bring the Kurdish resistance closer to the banned Kurdish Workers' Party PKK.
Leftists also assume that the Turkish or Kurdish secret service is cooperating with German security authorities in order to weaken the democratic resistance of the Kurds.
On Monday, the Turkish Constitutional Court approved a ban against the moderate, pro-Kurdish opposition party HDP.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan accuses her of being the extended arm of the PKK.