Just two days after his deposition, the pro-Kurdish mayor of the city of Hakkari in southeastern Turkey was sentenced to 19 years and six months in prison.

The verdict against Mehmet Siddik Akis was handed down on Wednesday for “terrorism,” his defense attorney told the AFP news agency. As pictures published by a local journalist on the online service X showed, there were protests in Hakkari shortly after the verdict.

Akis, a member of the pro-Kurdish opposition party DEM, was the first pro-Kurdish mayor to be taken into custody on Monday since the local elections on March 31.  In parliament in Ankara, members of the ruling AKP party and the DEM clashed on Tuesday when the latter wanted to protest against the mayor’s dismissal. In Hakkari, police used rubber bullets against demonstrators, according to the pro-opposition media outlet Medyascope.

After his sentencing on Wednesday, Akis spoke of a “political trial” and said: “I am 53 years old, I have fought all these years and I will continue to fight.” Akis is accused by the Turkish judiciary of having links to the banned Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which he denies.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan reacted to the conviction by saying: “The courts have decided according to the law.” Referring to the clashes in parliament on Tuesday, Erdogan said: “There is no point in attacking left and right with placards in hand. If someone is involved in ‘illegal activities’, the law must be ‘enforced,'” Erdogan said. “Hakkari was a first step in this direction.”

The DEM, the former HDP, won the local elections in a total of 77 Turkish municipalities at the end of March. These included several large cities in the predominantly Kurdish southeast of the country, such as Diyarbakir, the largest city in the region. President Erdogan’s AKP, on the other hand, suffered an electoral debacle in the local elections.

Erdogan accuses the HDP of being the political arm of the PKK. The HDP denies this. The HDP is being banned and HDP MPs have joined forces to form the DEM. The former HDP chairman Selahattin Demirtas has been in prison since 2016 and in May he was sentenced to 42 years in prison for “violating the unity of the state” among other things.