Turkish police using teargas stormed an Istanbul courthouse today and seized Kurdish rebel supporters who had briefly taken several judges hostage there, the interior minister said.
Witnesses saw heavily armed riot police leading away about 20 demonstrators in handcuffs. There were no immediate reports of any injuries.
The supporters of the guerrilla Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) had occupied the courthouse and chanted slogans in support of their jailed leader, Abdullah Ocalan. They also hung banners out of a third-floor window in support of the group.
Some 30,000 people were killed in a PKK rebellion in mainly Kurdish southeast Turkey that began in 1984. The fighting dwindled after Ocalan was seized by Turkish special forces in Kenya in 1999, brought back to Turkey and jailed after a trial for treason.
The PKK, whose fighters had withdrawn to the mountains of northern Iraq, has recently called off a unilateral ceasefire, however, that Turkish authorities had dismissed as a ruse to achieve by political aims what an armed campaign had failed to secure.
Ocalan is being kept as the only prisoner on Imrali prison island, near Istanbul. The original death sentence against him was commuted to life imprisonment after Turkey abandoned the death sentence.