Turkish police round up Kurdish party members

DIYARBAKIR, Turkey (Reuters) - Turkish police detained on Thursday scores of members of a recently banned Kurdish political party, including several mayors, suspected of having links with an outlawed militant group.

Aides of the chief state prosecutor in the southeastern city of Diyarbakir, who ordered the early morning raids by anti-terrorism squads, said 43 people had been detained.

They were members of the Democratic Society Party (DTP) or activists linked to the DTP, the only Kurdish party represented in parliament. Some accounts from Kurdish sources put the total number arrested at between 60 and 80.

The Constitutional Court banned the DTP on Dec. 11 because of its links with the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), a separatist, militant movement designated a terrorist organisation by Turkey, the European Union and United States.

A lawyer of jailed PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan was among those held in Diyarbakir and the other southeastern cities of Siirt, Sirnak and Sanliurfa, as well as in Istanbul and Ankara.

The court ban on the DTP sparked days of unrest in the southeast of Turkey, which has applied to join the EU.

The ruling was also opposed by Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, who had launched an initiative to improve Kurdish rights aimed at ending a 25-year-old ethnic conflict that has cost some 40,000 lives.

Kurds, who are estimated to make up about 20 percent of Turkey's population of 71 million people, were for decades forbidden to use their language and many have long complained of discrimination.

After the police raids around 1,000 people gathered peacefully in front of the main office in Diyarbakir of another Kurdish party, the Peace and Democracy Party (BDP), while party deputies met inside.

Addressing the crowd, the city's mayor Osman Baydemir warned that the Turkish state would be left with no-one to hold a dialogue with if the detentions continued. "If this process of purges continue, I state it very obviously: a day will come when you will find no-one to shake hands with," he said.

The European Commission has also criticised the court decision to ban the DTP, but reproached the party for keeping links with the PKK.

On Tuesday, a state prosecutor opened an inquiry targeting Ahmet Turk, the chairman of the DTP over comments that Ocalan had sent word through his lawyers advising the party's legislators to remain in parliament despite the court ban.

The legislators, who had planned to quit, announced last Friday they would join the BDP in order to stay in parliament.

The BDP is the seventh Kurdish political party to be formed in Turkey. Its six predecessors have been shut down.

(Writing by Selcuk Gokoluk; Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore)