Tahir Elci, who was head of the Diyarbakir Bar Association, had previously been detained and received death threats after saying the separatist PKK should not be regarded as a terrorist organisation.
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A senior lawyer and two police officers have died after gunfire erupted in Turkey’s southeastern province of Diyarbakir on Saturday, Anadolu agency reported.
“Tahir Elci is not someone to be killed by coincidence”, said Seyhmus Gokalp, a council member with the Turkish Medical Association in Diyarbakir.
ILYAS AKENGIN/AFP/Getty Images Tahir Elci’s mother reacts shortly after he was killed.
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.
Police also clashed with protesters in Diyarbakir, an AFP photographer said, and there were also protests in the capital Ankara and western port city of Izmir, according to Turkish media.
Riot police were called in to disperse the demonstrators with tear gas, rubber bullets, and a water cannon.
“Let me say in these hours after the killing of Elci, I would like to stigmatize it as a bad thing”, Mogherini said.
The pro-Kurdish HDP Party called his death a “planned assassination”.
The Diyarbakir local government instituted a curfew in the area after the shooting clashes.
“This incident shows that Turkey’s fight against terror is right”, said Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who condemned the attack.
Elci had been arrested on propaganda charges in October after he said the Kurdistan Workers Party, known as PKK, was not a terrorist organization during a television appearance.
“A person ran towards Elci fired and then started to run away” Dogan news agency’s reporter Felat Bozarslan recalls.
Turkish officials insist that the rights activist was not the target of the attack as Interior Minister Efkan Ala said at a news conference where Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag was present that a gunfight broke out after someone opened fire at police from an unidentified auto.
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The U.S. embassy expressed its shock over Elci’s death, calling him on Twitter a “courageous defender of human rights”.
