Diyarbakir: Tens of thousands of people on Sunday mourned the killing of a prominent Kurdish human rights lawyer in Turkey’s troubled southeast that has raised new tensions with its biggest ethnic minority.
Tahir Elci, one of the country’s best-known advocates for Kurdish rights, was killed on Saturday in a gun battle between police and unidentified gunmen in southeastern city of Diyarbakir while making a statement calling for calm. Two police were also killed.
The death of Elci, who was the head of Diyarbakir Bar Association, triggered protests from Diyarbakir to Istanbul, where police used water cannons and tear gas to disperse the demonstrators.
Some 50,000 people mourned as his casket draped in the red, yellow and green Kurdish flag and red carnations made its way through the streets of Diyarbakir - the biggest city in the mainly Kurdish southeast, an AFP correspondent reported.
Many colleagues including Metin Feyzioglu, head of the Turkish Bar Association, carried his coffin, while prayers and slogans echoed from the crowd, who had gathered behind a huge black banner that read: “We will never forget you.”
“Martyrs do not die, Tahir Elci is immortal,” demonstrators chanted in Kurdish.
Elci was killed by a single bullet to his head, but it was not clear whether the attack directly targeted the lawyer or whether he died in the crossfire during shooting between the assailants and police.
Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu has said the authorities were investigating both possibilities. But supporters of Elci accused the state of being behind the murder.
Elci had in October been released pending trial in October after being detained over an an interview in which he said the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), was not a “terrorist” organisation.
He risked up to seven years in prison if convicted on charges of “justifying terrorism”.
A hugely prominent figure in legal circles in southeast Turkey, Elci had defended three reporters for the US-based news organisation Vice News after they were detained in Diyarbakir in August.
Two British reporters were released but their Iraqi colleague Mohammad Esmael Rasool is still in detention. Vice News said Elci had remained the lead lawyer on the case.
Turkey’s southeast has been hit by the worst violence in years after a two-year old ceasefire between the Turkish government and the PKK, considered a terrorist organisation by Turkey, the United States and the European Union, collapsed in July.
