ISTANBUL: Several dozen illegal immigrants yesterday protested against their detention conditions in a state-run center in Istanbul, breaking windows and throwing burning blankets out onto the street.
“We are here for one year and two months. They give us food only once a day and don’t give us any medicine ... They treat us like animals,” one of the immigrants, who said he was a Tamil from Sri Lanka, told an AFP correspondent from a window. Several other immigrants from Africa, Southeast Asia and the Middle East also criticized insufficient food supplies and medical treatment.
The center in Kumkapi, on Istanbul’s European side, hosts between 600 and 800 immigrants arrested in Turkey while trying to cross into Europe and awaiting deportation, police sources said.
There was no indication that police were preparing to intervene as the situation was returning to normal.
Turkey lies on a major people-smuggling route from Asia to Western Europe and illegal migrants are detained on an almost daily basis.
In June, a Somali man died of a gunshot wound and four people, among them two police officers, were injured during a riot at a center for illegal immigrants in the northwestern province of Kirklareli, near the border with Bulgaria.
Rebels jailed
A Turkish court meanwhile charged and jailed pending trial five people in connection with a Kurdish rebel attack on a police bus in the country’s southeast that claimed five lives.
Three suspected members of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which carried out last week’s assault, were charged with membership in an illegal organization and carrying out armed attacks on its behalf.
The two remaining suspects were charged with aiding and abetting the operations.
