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.
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Eyewitnesses said the lawyer, Tahir Elci, was giving a press statement, calling for peace between the Turkish security forces and Kurdish separatists.
Tahir Elci, 49, was shot in Diyarbakir city Saturday while making a press statement.
The office of the Diyarbakir governor said one policeman was also killed and two others were injured.
Elci had been criticised in Turkey for saying the banned Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) was not a terrorist organisation, as the government describes it. He had, however, denounced PKK violence.
A video clip posted on the website of the privately owned Dogan news agency showed gunmen hiding behind the minaret of a mosque and firing on Elci and a group of activists.
“Tahir Elci is not someone to be killed by coincidence”, said Seyhmus Gokalp, a council member with the Turkish Medical Association in Diyarbakir. Turkey declared a curfew in Diyarbakir’s Sur district after the clashes broke out, according to Hurriyet newspaper. “This planned assassination targeted law and justice through Tahir Elci….”
On October 19, an Istanbul court issued a warrant for Elci on charges of “propaganda for a terror organization” after the lawyer said on a CNN Turk program, “PKK is not a terrorist organization….”
“Let me say in these hours after the killing of Elci, I would like to stigmatize it as a bad thing”, Mogherini said.
Turkey and its allies consider the PKK to be a terrorist organization, and the government has stepped up attacks against it in recent months.
President Tayyip Erdogan said the shooting, which took place in the southeastern city of Diyarbakir, showed Turkey was right in “its determination to fight terrorism”.
The preliminary autopsy report said that Tahir Elci died “from a single long distance shot”.
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Elci had said through his Twitter account that he had received death threats because of his televised comments in which he defended the rebels.
