A gunman yesterday ambushed a provincial office of Turkey’s pro-Kurdish party killing a woman and renewing alarm at the heated rhetoric accompanying government efforts to shut the party down.
The Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) identified the victim as Deniz Poyraz, a party official in the western province of Izmir where the ugly morning attack took place.
The party’s national co-leader said a planned meeting of 40 officials at the office had been called off for unrelated reasons moments before the attack.
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Speaking to reporters, HDP co-leader Mithat Sancar said; ‘The plan here was clear, What they wanted was a massacre.’
The HDP is the Turkish parliament’s third-largest party, supporting liberal causes and espousing leftist economic views.
But President Recep Tayyip Erdogan views it as the political front of outlawed Kurdish militants who have been waging a decades-long insurgency that has claimed tens of thousands of lives.
Erdogan frequently makes fiery speeches denouncing the party, which has seen scores of its members detained. The government’s attempt to use the courts to disband it has drawn sharp rebukes in Europe and the United States.
The HDP said the rhetoric coming from Erdogan’s ruling party was the “instigator of this brutal attack”.
‘After months of attacks by the ruling party and the interior ministry, and families being told to organise outside our provincial offices to cause provocation, there was an attack this morning at 10:30 am on our Izmir province building,’ it said in a statement.
The ruling AKP party’s official spokesman called the incident ‘a provocation aimed at disturbing (Turkey’s) peace and security’.
‘We condemn the attack and the murder that occurred at the HDP Izmir office,‘ AKP spokesman Omer Celik submitted.
AFRICA TODAY NEWS, NEW YORK