A seven-year old boy shot in the chest during a third day of sustained rioting by Kurds in eastern Turkey died overnight, a hospital source said on Friday.
The child was fatally wounded on Thursday when about 10 000 angry protesters took to the streets of Diyarbakir, Turkey’s largest Kurdish-majority city, for the funerals of three people killed during the earlier clashes with police.
Police shot into the air during the confrontations, according to witnesses. Local authorities did not provide any details on the circumstances of boy’s death.
More than 250 people have been injured during clashes, more than half of them police and security personnel.
Interior Minister Abdulkadir Aksu arrived in Diyarbakir late on Thursday, after demonstrators vandalised numerous stores and attacked public buildings in a third day of rioting.
The situation was relatively calm on Friday morning, and most stores had reopened, an Agence France-Presse correspondent on the scene reported.
The violence erupted on Tuesday after the funerals of four of 14 rebels from the separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), killed by the army during fighting at the weekend.
Hundreds of Kurdish youths went on the rampage in Diyarbakir on Tuesday and Wednesday, attacking police with stones and petrol bombs and vandalising shops and public buildings.
The violence spilled over on Thursday to the nearby town of Batman, where the rioters fire-bombed a bank and ransacked the office of a far-right nationalist party, the Anatolia news agency said.
Beside the seven-year old boy, three other people were killed during this week’s urban demonstrations: a protestor, a nine-year-old boy hit by a bullet while watching from a roof, and a man killed in a traffic accident while running from the melee.
Kurdish politicians have blamed the riots on Ankara’s failure to meet their demands for greater freedoms.
Keen to boost its bid to join the European Union, Ankara has made a series of gestures to the Kurds, including allowing Kurdish-language broadcasts and private language courses, but activists want broader rights.
The conflict has claimed about 37 000 lives since the PKK, blacklisted as a terrorist group by Ankara, the European Union and the United States, took up arms for Kurdish self-rule in the southeast in 1984. – AFP