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ISTANBUL, Sept 4 (AFP) - 17h40 - Turkish police
on Sunday detained 88 people and used truncheons and
tear gas against Kurdish activists who protested
after they were barred from attending a planned
demonstration in favour of jailed Kurdish rebel
leader Abdullah Ocalan, media reports said.
Footage broadcast on CNN-Turk news channel showed
protestors -- some of whom had covered their faces
with Palestinian-style checkered kaffiyehs --
hurling incendiary devices at shops and in the
streets in the Alibeykoy district in the city's
European side.
Protestors threw an incendiary device at a bank in
the Sisli district, a bus was set on fire in the
Gazi neighbourhood while demonstrators pelted a
police station with stones in the downtown Beyoglu,
CNN-Turk said.
Riot police fired shots into the air to disperse
some 150 protestors who had blocked a highway in
Kadikoy district in the city's Asian side across the
Bosphorus Strait, the Anatolia news agency said.
Eighty-eight people were detained in 12 separate
incidents in Istanbul, the agency added.
The unrest broke out when the activists were
prevented from going to the nearby town of Gemlik
for a protest rally against the prison conditions of
Ocalan, organised by a non-governmental organisation
of prisoners' relatives, Anatolia added.
Local authorities had banned the demonstration on
the grounds that it was masterminded by Ocalan's
outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has
waged a bloody armed campaign against Ankara since
1984.
Police and paramilitary gendarmerie troops,
reinforced by forces from neighbouring towns, set up
checkpoints at all entrances to Gemlik and stopped
some 60 buses bringing in activists from around the
country several kilometres (miles) away from the
town.
Hundreds of demonstrators boarded the buses to
return home after waiting for more than six hours
and not being granted permission to go into Gemlik,
Anatolia said.
Ocalan has been in solitary confinement on a prison
island in northwestern Turkey since being sentenced
to death in 1999 for treason. His sentence was later
commuted to life imprisonment.
Kurdish activists and the PKK have urged Ankara to
move Ocalan to an ordinary jail from the island of
Imrali on the grounds that solitary confinement is
inhumane and conditions on the island are affecting
Ocalan's health.
Improving Ocalan's prison conditions was one of the
demands made by the PKK's political wing, KONGRA-GEL,
when it announced a one-month unilateral ceasefire
to give Ankara time to improve Kurdish freedoms.
The truce has been brushed aside by the Turkish
army.
Some 37,000 people have been killed since 1984 when
the rebels first took up arms for self-rule in
mainly Kurdish southeast Turkey.
AFP
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