The police attacked and detained 67 students during a commemoration event, held at İstanbul University’s central Beyazıt campus, for the people who lost their lives on October 10, 2015, due to an Islamic State bomb attack in Turkish capital city of Ankara.
As the students gathered for the commemoration, the police violently attacked and battered the students while preventing people around for taking camera records. Among the left-wing students and academics, 12 members of the Communist Youth of Turkey were taken into custody along with many other students.
The lawyers of detained students said, “İt is said some students’ arms were broken during the violent attack. They are under medical examination, we are waiting for them. Then they will be sent to the police station.”
October 10, 2017, marks the second anniversary of the IS attack with two bombs detonated outside Ankara central railway station. Killing more than 100 people and leaving several hundred wounded, the Ankara bombing in 2015 has become the deadliest terror attack in Turkish history. The Islamist terrorists targeted the “Labour, Democracy and Democracy” rally organized by Turkey’s left-wing trade unions and some political parties including the pro-Kurdish Democratic Peoples’ Party (HDP).
COMMUNIST PARTY OF TURKEY: ‘IMMEDIATELY RELEASE THE DETAINED STUDENTS’
Meanwhile, the Communist Party of Turkey (TKP) released a statement regarding the police violence. "It is the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government that turned Turkey into a country where Islamist organizations could stage massacres, and that supported such organizations," the statement reads, showing the AKP party and İstanbul University rector office responsible for the recent police attack on the students.
Indicating that the AKP government-led police violence on the students who gathered to protest the IS attack in 2015 shows the complicity of the AKP to the IS attack, the TKP called the government to stop its interventions in protests and demonstrations at universities, and to immediately release all the detained students including members of the Communist Youth of Turkey.
