ISTANBUL, Turkey — A Turkish protester was killed after sustaining a head injury, local media said Tuesday, marking the second reported fatality in five days of running street battles between police and anti-government demonstrators.
Abdullah Comert, 22, a youth branch member of the opposition Republican People’s Party, died late Monday after being struck in the head by a “gas canister” in the volatile southern province of Hatay, the Turkish daily Hurriyet reported on its website. Further details were not immediately available.
Police have been making liberal use of tear gas to break up protests throughout the country. Human rights activists and others have accused the security forces of using excessive against demonstrators.
Initial reports indicated that Comert died after being shot with a firearm. But the Hurriyet newspaper later quoted an opposition party leader saying that an autopsy showed that a gas canister had caused the fatal injury.
Protests erupted late last week in Istanbul after the violent dispersal of environmental activists opposed to the planned demolition of a downtown park to make way for a shopping center.
The protests soon spread to other cities and became a broad rejection of what critics call the autocratic style of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s top elected official. Erdogan has dismissed the protesters as politically motivated troublemakers.
By Sunday there was a heavy police presence in southern Hatay in anticipation of protests spreading to the province, which has been tense since a car bombing May 11 that killed 52 people in the city of Reyhanli, near the Syrian border. The province has long been on edge because of the spillover effects of the civil war raging in Syria.
On Monday, a physicians’ group said the first known fatality in the protests was a 20-year-old man who was hit by a taxi as he and other protesters were organizing a demonstration in an Istanbul neighborhood.
As of Monday, according to a the Turkish Doctors’ Union, more than 2,300 people had been injured during the protests and clashes with police.
[For the record, 10:55 a.m. June 4: An earlier version of this post incorrectly stated that the Turkish protests were in their fourth day. The demonstrations, which began Friday, are in their fifth day.]