4th Kurdish prisoner commits suicide in Turkey over Ocalan’s prison conditions
MARDIN, Turkey Kurdistan,— A fourth Kurdish prisoner in Turkey committed suicide Monday to protest against the conditions of jailed Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan, a pro-Kurdish party official and an MP said.
The death of Medya Cinar follows the suicide of three others in prison, the Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) official who did not wish to be named told AFP.
A HDP lawmaker, Tuma Celik, also said Cinar had killed herself in a prison in the Kurdish southeast Mardin province.
But the Mardin public prosecutor’s office denied reports of Cinar committing suicide as an act of protest, saying such claims were “biased” and “misleading”.
Cinar had been charged with “destroying the state’s unity and country’s integrity”, the prosecutor’s office said in a statement, after she was detained in 2016.
The office said Cinar “tried to hang herself” and after she was taken to a hospital, she was pronounced dead. Authorities have launched a probe, it said.
Since a hunger strike launched by Kurdish lawmaker Leyla Guven in the southeastern Kurdish-majority city of Diyarbakir in Turkey Kurdistan (Bakur) in November 2018, Cinar, Ugur Sakar, Zulkuf Gezen and Ayten Becet have taken their lives.
Guven has been on hunger strike for nearly 140 days.
Gezen hanged himself earlier this month but officials rejected claims he killed himself as part of a protest.
Ocalan was captured in 1999 and is serving a life sentence on Imrali island, close to Istanbul.
A large Kurdish community in Turkey and worldwide openly sympathise with PKK rebels and Abdullah Ocalan, who founded the PKK group in 1974 and currently serving a life sentence in Turkey. Ocalan has a high symbolic value for most Kurds in Turkey and worldwide according to observers.
Kurds see Ocalan, as a living symbol of the Kurdish cause in Turkey.
The PKK took up arms in 1984 against the Turkish state, which still denies the constitutional existence of Kurds, to push for greater autonomy in Turkish Kurdistan for the Kurdish minority who make up around 22.5 million of the country’s 79-million population. More than 40,000 Turkish soldiers and Kurdish rebels, have been killed in the conflict.
Ocalan has not had access to his lawyers since 2011. Dozens went on hunger strike calling for access for Ocalan’s lawyers and family members.
HDP MP Ayse Acar Basaran on Saturday said that Becet committed suicide “to protest the inhuman, unlawful and illegitimate isolation imposed on Abdullah Ocalan at Imrali”.
Cinar was normally held in a prison in the eastern Van province, Celik said.
She was brought to Mardin for a hearing in her trial after being arrested following clashes with authorities in 2016 in Nusaybin, a southern town on the Syrian border.
Nusaybin was under curfew for weeks during a military operation to push Kurdish militants out of the town, where the authorities said they had dug trenches and put up barricades.
Copyright © 2019, respective author or news agency, AFP | Ekurd.net
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