Hundreds of Kurds staged a violent protest Saturday in south-eastern Turkey after police said two Kurdish rebels had been killed in a gunbattle after a raid on their hideout. The protestors demonstrated near where the two alleged members of the banned Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) died earlier in the centre of Diyarbakir, the main city of the majority Kurdish region.
Many claimed that police had "executed" the pair and then said that they were PKK rebels who had resisted. The incident came days after the killing of 35 Kurds in an airstrike on the Iraqi border who turned out to be civilian smugglers and not rebel fighters as the military claimed.
"They were university students and they did not own any guns," said an 18-year-old protestor, contradicting local police who said the pair were rebels and two rifles and three hand grenades had been seized. "Police threatened us and told us 'Your end will be like theirs,' when we were around the house where the killings happened," said a 17-year-old.
Raci Bilici of the Human Rights Association's Diyarbakir branch told AFP he had tried to visit the scene with three other rights activists to investigate the claims, but the police stopped them. The claims of locals should be taken seriously, Bilici said.
Diyarbakir governor Mustafa Toprak said the two threw themselves out of the balcony from the third floor of the apartment so not to get captured alive. "After the autopsy the cause of their death, how many bullets they received, would be clear," media reports quoted Toprak as saying, after he visited a police officer who was reportedly injured in the shootout.