Rescues end amid protests
SOMA, Turkey — Turkish police put the mining town of Soma on virtual lockdown yesterday, setting up checkpoints and detaining dozens of people to enforce a ban on protests as rescue efforts after the country’s worst industrial disaster ended.
The last two bodies of workers still thought to have been left in the mine were carried out four days after a fire sent deadly carbon monoxide through it. That brought the death toll to 301, Energy Minister Taner Yildiz said.
Hundreds of riot police patrolled the streets while others checked identity cards at three checkpoints on the approach road to Soma, a witness said. The local governor banned protests in response to clashes a day earlier between police and several thousand demonstrators.
Eight lawyers from the Contemporary Jurists Association, including its leader, were handcuffed and detained during the lockdown on suspicion that they had gone to the town to take part in more protests, the private Dogan news agency reported.
A total of 36 people were arrested and taken to a sports center in the town, where they chanted: “The pressure cannot intimidate us,” the agency said.
Tuesday’s disaster triggered protests across Turkey, aimed at mine owners accused of ignoring safety for profit, and at Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan’s government, which is seen as too close to industry bosses and insensitive in its response.
Erdogan has presided over a decade of rapid economic growth, but worker-safety standards have failed to keep pace, leaving Turkey with one of the world’s worst industrialaccident records. His opponents blame the government for privatizing leases at previously state-controlled mines, and turning them over to politically connected businessmen who they said might have skimped on safety to maximize profit.
Demonstrators clashed with police in the western port city of Izmir overnight, some setting up makeshift barricades and throwing stones and fireworks at the police, the Hurriyet newspaper reported. About 40 people were detained.
There also were protests in Istanbul. Some residents in the city banged pots and pans from their windows, an act which was a feature of last summer’s nationwide antigovernment unrest.
The mining-company managers held a fractious news conference on Friday where they said an unexplained build-up of heat was thought to have led part of the mine to collapse, fanning a blaze that spread rapidly more than a mile under the surface.