After the resignation of Kadir Topbaş, who had been the mayor of İstanbul from the ruling party AKP since 2004, member of the metropolitan municipality has voted for Mevlüt Uysal to be the new mayor. He was the current mayor of the Başakşehir district, in İstanbul, Uysal is known to be the lawyer of the suspects from the Islamist group, which set fire to a hotel in Sivas, Turkey.
The fire in 1993 resulted in the killing of 33 people, mostly leftist intellectuals with Alevi origins which constitute Turkey’s largest Muslim minority and has historically been targeted by the radical Sunni Muslims.
Other lawyers of the Islamists, in that case, have also served in the parliament and in municipalities as the representatives of the ruling party AKP. The case was time-barred in 2012 when the AKP was in power, which then-Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced as good news.
Apart from being one of the lawyers defending the Islamists charged with murder in the Sivas massacre trial, Uysal is also known to be a member of an Islamist sect, İskenderpaşa sect. Uysal is a close acquaintance of Bilal Erdoğan, the son of President Erdoğan. His name has become known by the event that he made a public land in Başakşehir district available to Bilal Erdoğan to use for his foundation, TÜRGEV, when Uysal was the mayor of the district. The land, worth of approximately 606 million liras, was allocated for the foundation for 3 million liras for 30 years.
TÜRGEV (Foundation for Service to Youth and Education of Turkey), led by Bilal Erdoğan, is a government-supported reactionary institution, which has been frequently come to the public attention for the scandals of corruption.
