Turkey rounds up 90 people over alleged Kurdish militant links

Turkish police detained nearly 100 people over alleged links to Kurdish militant group PKK in an operation carried out in nine cities, including Kurdish-majority Diyarbakir, the local prosecutor's office said on Tuesday.

The police detained 90 out of 151 suspects they were seeking during the raids carried out at 183 addresses, and seized organisational documents and digital materials, the chief prosecutor's office in Diyarbakir said in a statement.

The suspects were accused of links to the outlawed group, the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which Turkey and its western allies designate as a terrorist group.

The PKK is regularly targeted in security forces raids.

The pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP)  announced on Sunday that 140 of its members had been detained by police since Thursday. It called the round up politically motivated.

Turkey’s government has long alleged that the HDP has links to the PKK, which the party denies. Many of the party's senior officials, including its former leader, have been put behind bars on trumped up charges of terrorism, which supporters say is punishment for daring to oppose Erdogan.

Clashes between Turkish security forces and the PKK resumed after a fragile two-year ceasefire collapsed in 2015.

The PKK's armed struggle with the Turkish government has killed more than 40,000 people since 1984, as the group attempted to lead a separatist insurgency in the country's southeast.

Last week, eight Turkish soldiers were killed by an improvised explosive device in southeastern Turkey in an attack which the government blamed on the PKK.

Agencies contributed to this report.

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