TURKISH police beat suspects until their wooden batons broke, a witness said yesterday at a murder trial seen as a test of Turkey's human rights record.
A journalist, Aydin Aydemir, said she saw police clubbing people in a sports complex in Istanbul where a fellow reporter, Met in Goktepe, was allegedly battered to death by police in January.
"We heard sounds of beating and wooden sticks breaking. I didn't see Metin but I saw a lot of people being beaten.
I thought the death toll would have been greater," she said.
Forty eight policemen went on trial yesterday in the south western town of Aydin for Goktepe's death.
The trial is being held under the critical eye of Turkey's Western allies.
Claims of extra judicial killings and deaths by torture in Turkish police custody are rife the Ankara based Human Rights Association says there were 2 I just in August this year but it is rare that the perpetrators conic before the law.
Aydemir said police rounded up scores of people at random for an identity check in Eyup sports complex after the funerals of two far left militant prisoner.
The trial was transferred to Aydin from Istanbul, some 800 km away, a move human rights activists say was an attempt to keep the court proceedings out of the public eye. But some 300 observers, journalists and relatives turned up at the court room yesterday morning, forcing Judge Turgut Yildirim to switch the trial to a large sports hall nearby.
Euro MPs have threatened to block hundreds of millions of dollars in European Union aid to Turkey, partly because of Ankara's human rights problems.
Amnesty International this month launched a worldwide campaign to focus attention on abuses in Turkey, particularly extra judicial killings, torture and disappearances.
Turkey says Amnesty is biased against it but the Foreign Minister, lets Tansu Ciller, on Thursday vowed to clamp down on human rights failings.
A statement from the minister yesterday said that the government's aim was "to bring the most civilised norms to our country so that the individual may benefit". "Democracies can only advance by converging with the rest of the world," she said.