DIYARBAKIR, Turkey, Feb 15 (AFP) - At least 18 people were injured and 70 others detained across Turkey Tuesday when police clashed with Kurdish activists at demonstrations marking the capture of Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan six years ago.
The most troubled protest was in Diyarbakir, the central city of the mainly Kurdish southeast, where 15 people were hurt and 55 others taken into custody.
"End the isolation," read banners held by a crowd of some 300 activists, referring to Ocalan's solitary confinement on a prison island in northwestern Turkey since his capture in Kenya on February 15, 1999.
Kurdish activists have long been calling for Ocalan's transfer to an ordinary jail, but their appeals have so far fallen on deaf ears in Ankara.
Police moved on the demonstrators, using truncheons and tear gas, when they refused to disperse after reading out a press statement and demanded to also stage a march and a sit-in.
The injured included policemen hurt by stones hurled by the crowd.
In Istanbul, riot police sprayed pepper gas on a crowd of several hundred people who attempted to march to the Greek consulate to denounce Greece's role in Ocalan's capture.
The protestors responded by throwing stones which they had ripped out of the pavement, breaking also the windows of several buildings nearby.
Turkish agents nabbed Ocalan in Nairobi after he was forced to leave the Greek embassy there, where he had been offered refuge for several days while on the run.
Police allowed a small group to lay a black wreath outside the consulate.
In the western city of Izmir, protestors armed with stones and molotov cocktails and chanting pro-Ocalan slogans also clashed with the police, leaving three people injured and one in custody, Anatolia news agency reported.
In Mersin, on Turkey's southern coast, riot police, backed by an armored vehicle, disrupted a demonstration in which the protestors set bonfires in the streets, television footage showed.
Fourteen people were detained, the NTV news channel reported.
Hundreds of Kurds also took to the streets in the southern French city of Marseille to call for Ocalan's release.
Ocalan, the leader of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), was condemned to death in June 1999, but his sentence was commuted to life in prison in 2001 following Turkey's abolition of capital punishment as part of reforms to embrace European Union norms.
The PKK waged a bloody armed campaign for Kurdish self-rule in southeast Turkey between 1984 and 1999, with the conflict claiming some 37,000 lives.
The rebels ended a five-year unilateral ceasefire with Ankara last June.
02/15/2005 16:53 GMT - AFP