Diyarbakır Bar Association head Tahir Elçi has been assassinated while making a press statement to protest recent attacks by special forces officers on historical sites in the southeastern province.

Diyarbakır Bar Association head Tahir Elçi has been assassinated while making a press statement to protest recent attacks by special forces officers on historical sites in the southeastern province.

Elçi, who was married with two children, was finishing a press conference regarding attacks by special forces that had targeted Diyarbakır’s famous Four-Legged Minaret in the city’s old Sur district when he was shot with a single bullet by unknown perpetrators as he tried to escape the attack, according to the JİNHA new agency.

According to an autopsy, Elçi was killed with a single bullet that enter his head behind his right ear and exited above his left eye.

One police officer was also reportedly killed in the attack, according to a statement from President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. İMC TV, however, reported that there was at least one civilian and one other unidentified person who were also killed.

Turkish Bar Association head Metin Feyzioğlu called on bar heads from around the country to come to Diyarbakır immediately. “This bullet wasn’t just fired at our brother but at all of Turkey – at all of us,” he said.

We’ve called of our bar heads here. They will come. We will both bury our friend and we will tell the whole world that we are one and that no one can dissuade us from our struggle for justice,” Feyzioğlu said.

“I feel like I’m in 1992 again with someone being killed every day,” lawyer Eren Keskin, who is also the co-chief editor for Özgür Gündem, told İMC TV.

Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) deputy Ertuğrul Kürkçü, meanwhile, likened Elçi’s killing to that of Hrant Dink, a Turkish-Armenian journalist who was gunned in 2007 by an ultranationalist allegedly acting in concert with elements of the police forces.

Pictures afterward showed Elçi’s body lying next to the minaret.

A clash between police and the perpetrators broke out after the assassination.

Two journalists, Aziz Aslan of Anadolu Agency and Ramazan Yavuz of the Doğan News Agency, were also injured in the attack.

Police have also imposed a curfew on the Sur district amid continuing tension in the area.

Elçi had been facing jail time after he appeared on CNN Türk, saying that he did not view the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) as a “terrorist organization.”

Rallies have been called for around Turkey to protest the murder of Elçi.

Sendika.Org