TURKISH prosecutors are seeking to strip Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) MP Semra Guzel of her parliamentary immunity following an intense media and state-controlled smear campaign.

Photographs have emerged showing the Kurdish lawmaker meeting with fighter Volkan Bora in a Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) camp in Iraqi Kurdistan taken in 2014.

She had been engaged to Mr Bora who was killed in April 2017 and visited the camp while she was a medical student.

Ms Guzel insists that she was there “in the knowledge of the state and the authorities,” with the meeting taking place during peace talks between the government and the PKK.

“Although the pictures have been stored in the archives of the security authorities for almost five years, they are only now being published and used as a basis for defamation,” she said.

The opposition politician warned of a lynching, saying that she was being subjected to a “vicious defamation and sexist campaign” by a misogynistic government.

About 20,000 HDP members have been detained since 2016, around 10,000 of whom have been jailed, according to the party.

Hundreds of elected officials, including MPs, are behind bars with a case lodged by the Nationalist Movement Party — a fascist organisation that forms part of the coalition government — to shut the HDP down.