A political ally of former Turkish Cypriot chief negotiator Kudret Ozersay was arrested on Thursday night, amid a deepening row between Ozersay and the north’s ruling coalition over the coalition’s handling of the north’s “fake diploma scandal”.

Ahmet Tokatlioglu, a member of Ozersay’s party the HP’s central executive committee, was arrested in Kyrenia accused of having forged nine power of attorney documents on May 2 and May 3.

He appeared in court on Friday morning, and was remanded in custody for three days, with his next date in court set for Monday.

The arrest comes after the HP had bought billboards across northern Nicosia and used them to criticise the committee formed to examine a request filed by the north’s chief public prosecutor’s office to lift the ‘parliamentary’ immunity of Emrah Yesilirmak, an ‘MP’ who belongs to ruling coalition party the UBP.

Three of the committee’s five members also belonged to the UBP, with the committee concluding that the request for Yesilirmak’s immunity to be lifted was politically motivated and writing in the report that it is “not clear or explicit which action constitutes a crime”, and thus refusing to lift his immunity.

The billboards now read “recognise this lot! The UBP MPs who rejected the lifting of immunity in the fake diploma investigation committee”, alongside photographs of Oguzhan Hasipoglu, Hasan Kucuk and Ahmet Savasan, the committee’s three UBP members.

One of the billboards was then vandalised on Thursday, before Hasipoglu told the north’s public broadcaster BRT that he would file a complaint to the police over their content, saying they were “threatening us while we were discussing an idea in the committee that [Ozersay] does not like”.

He added that Ozersay had “declared a person guilty while we were still discussing the matter in the committee”, and said he believes the billboards’ content “constitutes a violation of the law”.

As such, Ozersay was called to be interviewed by the police late on Thursday night, and explained his side of the story on Friday morning.

“We gave our statements to the police last night. They went to the police and filed a complaint against us, claiming that their privacy was violated … I emphasised last night that our stance on these issues will not change and that they will not be able to silence us,” he said.

Of Tokatlioglu’s arrest, he said he has “full confidence in the courts”, and added, “we do not have immunity, and if we did, we would not oppose its lifting”.

Meanwhile, Yesilirmak himself made his first stamen on the matter since the report was filed, telling newspaper Yeniduzen on Friday that “I did not commit a crime” and that “none of the accusations against me in the file are based on any evidence”.

The report wrote that the request for immunity to be lifted was politically motivated, and mentioned Ozersay by name, pointing out that prior to joining the UBP, Yesilirmak had been a member of Ozersay’s party the HP.

As such, the report said, Ozersay had “attempted to manipulate public opinion for political purposes” by sharing “more than a hundred posts” on social media about the authenticity or otherwise of Yesilirmak’s degree.

The UBP members also said that “if there is a claim of academic inadequacy regarding a degree, the institution which has the legal authority to determine this is, in the first place, [the north’s higher education accreditation authority] Yodak, and not the police”.

The committee’s two CTP members, Ongun Talat and Urun Solyali, argued that Yesilirmak’s immunity should have been lifted, stating that the committee’s only job was to examine whether the allegation was “serious” and whether it had political purposes.

Yesilirmak received a degree in business administration from Morphou’s now-infamous Cyprus Health and Social Sciences University (KSTU), with rumours surrounding the possibility it was forged having first surfaced in February last year.

The report made it explicit that he received a bachelor’s degree from the university’s department of business administration, which has since been suspended by Yodak, “despite not attending classes and exams”.