Officials in Diyarbakir, the biggest city in Turkey’s Kurdish-majority southeast, said two men -- one aged 78, the other 18 -- wounded in the riots that began there last Tuesday died overnight at the Diyarbakir hospital.
Three of the deaths occurred on Sunday night in Istanbul when someone from a group of about 100 masked demonstrators hurled a molotov cocktail at a crowded city bus in the working-class neighborhood of Bagcilar.
A panicked elderly woman who threw herself out of the burning vehicle was struck down and killed by a passing car and two more bodies were pulled out of the wreckage of the bus that later crashed into a truck, media reports said.
A crowd of Bagcilar residents then took to the streets, chanting slogans against the armed separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), in whose favor the rioters had been demonstrating.
Earlier Sunday, a group of about 200 sympathizers of the PKK -- tagged a terrorist organization by Turkey, the European Union and the United States -- clashed with riot police at Taksim Square, the heart of the shopping and entertainment district of Turkey’s biggest city.
The demonstrators sought refuge in the nearby popular neighborhood of Dolapdere, whose inhabitants -- mostly Roms -- attacked them with knives, axes and sticks, chanting nationalist slogans.
A 16th person died in an indirectly related incident in Istanbul’s middle-class Fatih district on Friday, when a bomb went off in a crowded square in an attack claimed by the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons (TAK).
Turkish officials say TAK is a front the PKK uses to hit soft civilian targets in a bid to avoid tarnishing its self-proclaimed image of a guerrilla army that combats only the army and police; the PKK says it is made up of renegade former PKK militants over whom it no longer has any control.
The unrest in Istanbul followed most violent demonstrations in a dozen years to erupt in Diyarbakir during the funeral of four of 14 PKK militants killed in armed clashes with the army.
The violence spread to neighboring towns and provinces, claiming 12 lives, three of them children.
The last person to die in unrest in the mainly Kurdish-populated southeast was in Mardin province on Sunday night, provincial governor Mehmet KiliÐlar said.
The situation was calm Monday in Diyarbakir, an AFP correspondent reported, but the unrest spreading to Istanbul, a sprawling city of more than 12 million and home to hundreds of thousands of often poor Kurdish immigrants, raised the specter among observers of inter-ethnic violence.
“The use by some anti-government parties of ethnic divisions as a political instrument could degenerate into violence,” warned Jean-François Perouse, a researcher with a French sociological institute based in Istanbul.
He was referring to nationalist opposition parties strongly opposed to any political solution to Turkey’s Kurdish problem.
Perouse added that Istanbul’s Kurdish community, the result of ”forced immigration” sparked by violent fighting between the army and the PKK in southeast Turkey in the 1990s, is particularly violence-prone because “it has been economically and politically marginalized.”
Most editorials in the Turkish media Monday agreed in blaming the violence on the PKK, saying it was forced to keeping tensions high to ensure its own survival.
“The PKK, which feels that it has no place in the political process, is trying to revive the conditions of the old days of the dirty war,” commented columnist Ferai Tinc in the mass-selling daily Hurriyet.
Clashes between government forces and the PKK have claimed more than 37,000 lives since 1984, ravaged the economy of the already impoverished southeast and led to the migration -- forced and unforced -- of millions of people.