Leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) Murat Karayılan on Friday promised to respond to recent detention of politicians from the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) by Turkish authorities.
Over the past 24 hours, co-chairs of the HDP - Figen Yüksekdağ and Selahattin Demirtaş - as well as over a dozen parliament members have been detained in raids that were conducted in a number of Turkish cities.
"We can give the necessary response on all fronts, and we will," Karayılan said, commenting on the recent detentions, as quoted by the Turkish Minute newspaper.
He added that this "attack" against the Kurdish people conducted by the ruling Turkey's Justice and Development Party (AKP) would deepen the tensions between Ankara and the PKK.
Turkish authorities arrested the leaders of the main pro-Kurdish opposition party in a terrorism investigation on Friday, drawing strong international condemnation of a widening crackdown on dissent under President Tayyip Erdoğan.
Selahattin Demirtaş and Figen Yüksekdağ, co-leaders of the Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP), were jailed pending trial after being held in overnight raids, officials said. Ten other HDP lawmakers were also detained, although some were later released.
Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yıldırım told reporters: "Turkey is a nation of laws, nobody has preferential treatment before the law ... What's been done is within the rule of law."
The HDP lawmakers were arrested after they refused to give testimony in a probe linked to "terrorist propaganda". "Politics can't be a shield for committing crimes," Yıldırım said.
Hours after the detentions, a car bomb planted by suspected Kurdish PKK militants killed nine people and wounded more than 100 near a police station in the southeastern city of Diyarbakır where some of the lawmakers were being held.
The HDP said the detentions risked triggering civil war.
In a video message on a website close to the PKK, one of the militant group's top commanders, Murat Karayılan, said the group would intensify its three-decade old armed struggle against Turkey and called on Kurds, the country's largest minority, to react.
SOCIAL MEDIA BLOCKED
Access was restricted to social media including Twitter, WhatsApp, YouTube and Facebook - making them so slow they were effectively impossible to use - and a ban imposed on media coverage of the car bomb. Asked about the measures, Yildirim said access would return to normal "once the danger is removed".
In a statement on Twitter, still accessible in Turkey through virtual private networks (VPNs), the HDP called for the international community "to react against the Erdoğan regime's coup", while party spokesman Ayhan Bilgen described the detentions as an attempt to provoke a civil war.
"I will not hesitate to be held accountable in front of a fair and impartial judiciary. There is nothing I cannot answer for," the arrested Demirtaş said in a statement to the prosecutor, which was shared by HDP lawmaker Besime Konca.
"But I refuse to be an actor in this judicial theatre just because it was ordered by Erdoğan, whose own political past is suspicious," he said.
Police also raided and searched the party's head office in central Ankara. Police cars and armed vehicles had closed the entrances to the street of the HDP headquarters.
A group of protesters chanting slogans tried to reach the party offices, but were stopped by police before they could enter the street.
ATTACK ON LAWYERS
The lawyers accompanying the questionings were attacked by riot police at court house. Some lawyers protesting the attack are wounded. Diyarbakır Bar Association says, they try to prevent the lawyers' entrance to the court house.
RIOT POLICE CAPTURES STREETS
Water cannons and riot police have captured many streets with barricades in Diyarbakır. Police forces' intervention in the local people is leading to a stressful atmosphere in the city.
