ANKARA (Hurriyet)–Turkish police Tuesday detained 20 people in simultaneous operations across four provinces on alleged links to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), Anatolia news agency reported.
Anti-terror police rounded up the suspects in dawn raids on 22 locations in the southern provinces of Mersin, Gaziantep and Hatay and the eastern province of Adiyaman, the report said.
They were all brought to Gaziantep city for questioning, it said.
About 60 people, among them Kurdish mayors, were detained in similar raids last month.
The authorities say that the operations target an underground Kurdish group that is known as the urban arm of the PKK, and is accused of organizing pro-PKK protests and street violence in the Southeast.
The PKK, listed as a terrorist group by Turkey, struggles for the rights and freedoms of Turkey’s beleaguered Kurdish minority.
In August, the government announced plans to expand Kurdish freedoms in a bid to erode popular support for the PKK but the government reforms have been seen as hollow.
But the initiative took a serious blow last month when seven soldiers were killed in a PKK ambush and the Constitutional Court outlawed Turkey’s main Kurdish party for links to the PKK, sparking deadly Kurdish protests and street violence.
Hye, shades of April 15, 1915! Turkey is still in the Ottoman mode…. Turkey has been committing a Genocide of the Kurds, labelling them as ‘terrorists’ (together w/Bush/Cheney)
– whereas the Kurds are seeking freedom from the Turkish Ottoman leaders of today.
Turkey knows only to Genocide peoples – even when they claim they are declaring a ‘war’.
Manooshag
Hye, April 24, 1915. Manooshag
so true its that mentality that is their identity and they are proud of it Manooshag…
The western world does not need to go to the years 1800 and 1915 to see who these genocidal ottoman turks or the turks were. The history repeats itself…… The turks were barbarians when they came from Mongolia and will always remain barbarian turks. What a shame for humanity to have these murderers around!