The veteran leader of Turkey's main secular opposition party resigned today, saying he was the victim of a conspiracy following the release of a videotape on the Internet purporting to show him and a woman in a bedroom.
The resignation of Deniz Baykal, a fierce critic of the ruling Islamist-leaning AK Party, comes as his secularist Republican People's Party (CHP) has pledged to block plans by the government to hold a referendum on constitutional reforms.
Mr Baykal accused the AK Party, whose roots lie in political Islam, of having knowledge of the videotape, which has been widely circulated on the Internet.
"This kind of illegal activity carried out on the leader of the main opposition party could not have been done without the knowledge of the government," Mr Baykal told a news conference.
"If this has a price, and that price is the resignation from CHP leadership, I am ready to pay it. My resignation does not mean running away, or giving in," Baykal said. "On the contrary, it means that I'm fighting it."
Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan's government is preparing to call a national referendum on constitutional reforms to overhaul the judiciary and make the army answerable to civilian courts, changes he says are needed to meet European Union entry demands.
Secularist critics say the reforms are a furtive attempt by the AK Party to seize control of all levers of state and undermine Turkey's secularist constitution.
Mr Baykal had said the CHP will appeal to the Constitutional Court to block any referendum, which Mr Erdogan wants to hold in July after winning parliamentary approval last week.
The videotape, posted on YouTube late last week, shows a man who looks like Mr Baykal in his underwear getting dressed in a bedroom with a woman who also appears half-naked. Mr Baykal is married.
Turkish media says the woman in the tape looks like a married legislator.
Reuters