About 4,000 people took to the streets to protest Wednesday's slaying of a local police chief and five officers in an ambush, said to be staged by the Turkish Hizbollah group in the southeast region metropolis, Diyarbakir, reported AFP.
Thousands of protestors packed the courtyard of police headquarters in the city where a state ceremony was being held to honor chief Gaffar Okkan and his colleagues.
Fingers of accusation were pointed at Hizbollah to which the slain police chief was a hated figure, said the BBC radio on Wednesday.
The radio station added that Okkan had cracked down on the Islamist group many times and that he had received letters of threats from the group.
According to Anatolia news agency, Okkan recently had carried out successful operations against Hizbollah and “gained people's trust and appreciation. His death caused deep sorrow among people.”
In an interview published Thursday with the mass-circulation Sabah daily, given only hours before his death, Okkan said that police had identified 26 Hizbollah hitmen, said AFP.
Diyarbakir governor Cemil Serhadli told Anatolia Thursday that a number of people were arrested in the swoop but none were linked to the ambush.
"We believe the attack was carried out by four people," he said.
The Turkish agency identified the murdered officers as Sabri Gun, Mehmet Sepetci, Atilla Durmus, Selahattin Baysoy, and Mehmet Kamali, while Policemen Nuri Bozkurt, Mustafa Dince, Veli Goktepe and Fatih Gokcek were also wounded in the attack.
Last year, the authorities unearthed the bodies of 68 people in shallow graves across Turkey, believed to have been kidnapped and killed by the radical group, whose leader Huseyin Velioglu was shot dead by the police a year ago.
The group has no links with Lebanese Hizbollah – Albawaba.com
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