People in most districts in Diyarbakır province, particularly Bağlar and Yenişehir, joined a protest by switching off and on their lights at 19:00 p.m. for 15 minutes in show of a solidarity of hundreds of prisoners on hunger strike across Turkey.
The strikers are demanding the right to receive education in Kurdish, to use Kurdish in courtrooms and an end to the isolation of Abdullah Öcalan, the leader of the terrorist Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), who is currently imprisoned on İmralı Island in the Sea of Marmara south of İstanbul.
The protest was organized by the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP). Meanwhile, a group of people gathered and chanted slogans in front of a guesthouse that belongs to mayor's office in Diyarbakır, where several BDP deputies are on hunger strike.
BDP's Diyarbakır Mayor Osman Baydemir, BDP Co-chairperson Gulten Kışanak; deputies Aysel Tugluk, Sırrı Sureyya Onder, Sabahat Tuncer and Adil Kurt announced on Saturday that they were starting a hunger strike on the grounds that the government has taken no steps to end the hunger strike of hundreds of prisoners for two months.
Police used pepper spray and water cannons to disperce the crowd. Fleeing to other streets in the area, the protesters burned trash and used fireworks against the police.
Many protesters were detained during the demonstration.