Kurdish MPs condemn Turkish police torture, authorities deny wrongdoing
ERBIL, Kurdistan Region (Kurdistan 24) - Opposition lawmakers at Turkey's Parliament denounced reports of torture on civilians by special operations police over the weekend in a village in the Kurdish province of Hakkari where government forces continued to clash with Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) fighters.
"You will get the hell out of our country. Despicable cursed colonialists," tweeted MP Nadir Yildirim of the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) in a comment about Turkish forces accompanied with pictures of tortured men.
"Do you think these [acts] will intimidate us. They will come back to you as rage and hatred," Yildirim who is a co-deputy of the HDP, a party that officially refrains from designating the Kurdish region in Turkey as a "colony."
Villagers in Hakkari's Semdinli district first reported torture on Sunday a day after PKK killed a member of the special operations police in clashes in the mountainous region.
One of the tortured men from the Sapata village contacted by Kurdistan 24 said over one hundred people including men, women, and children gathered in a square faced mistreatment and insults during a late night raid.
The man who wished to remain unidentified revealed that torture intensified throughout the night into the morning after the police took 36 men into custody at their headquarters in central Semdinli.
On Tuesday, the office of the Ankara-appointed Hakkari governor rejected all reports and allegations of torture.
In a press release on its website, the governorate stated that the raid on Sapata village came after the killing of one officer in combat and it was necessary to apprehend "suspects in the area where the fire came from."
"But some of the individuals resisting our security forces were arrested by the use of force by the law," it read.
Police initially barred tortured villagers from getting medical reports on their condition and filing a complaint to prosecutors.
But the governorate said ten people did file a criminal suit against the police, adding officers who had "a fault" would face an administrative investigation.
Still, the Turkish governor's office said that all news stories about torture were "unfounded" and meant to serve propaganda interests "of the terrorist group" PKK.
MP Adem Geveri who himself is from Hakkari said that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Justice and Development Party (AKP) government had no more "moral or legal" principles.
Geveri told Kurdistan 24 over the phone that his party HDP would continue to pursue the case until responsible officers receive due punishment.
Editing by Ava Homa
