A protester was killed yesterday in eastern Turkey when police clashed with Kurdish demonstrators decrying alleged abuses against jailed rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan, officials and media reports said.
"One person is dead," a police officer said by telephone. The officer gave no other details on the incidents in the town of Dogubayazit.
The Anatolia news agency said clashes erupted when the protesters, shouting slogans in favour of Ocalan and his separatist Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), attempted to hold a march, refusing police orders to disperse.
The demonstrators pelted officers with stones while police fired shots in the air and used tear gas and water cannons against the group, the agency said.
It was not immediately clear how the victim, a man, died, but unconfirmed reports said he was shot.
A police officer was also injured in the fighting while many demonstrators were taken into custody, Anatolia said.
Kurds demonstrated across Turkey at the weekend after Ocalan's lawyers reported that he had been assaulted by a guard and threatened with death in his cell on the prison island of Imrali, in the northwest, where he is the sole inmate.
Dozens were arrested and some were injured in the protests.
Justice Minister Mehmet Ali Sahin firmly denied the allegations of mistreatment on Sunday.
"When I heard these allegations, I conducted an immediate investigation… There has not been any mistreatment," he said.
Similar reports in the past have stirred anger among Turkey's sizeable Kurdish community, in which many view Ocalan as a hero.
Arrested in Kenya in February 1999, Ocalan, 60, was originally sentenced to death by a Turkish court but the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in 2002 after Turkey abolished the death penalty.
The PKK, blacklisted as a terrorist organisation by the European Union and the United States as well as by Turkey, picked up arms for self-rule in the mainly Kurdish east and southeast in 1984, sparking a conflict that has claimed some 44,000 lives.