2 Hunger Strikers Die, Bringing Toll to 40
A former prisoner and a student died of starvation, raising to 40 the number of people who have sacrificed themselves protesting Turkey’s new maximum security prisons.
Ayse Bastimur, 34, and Ozlem Durakcan, 19, were members of a banned Marxist group, the Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party-Front, according to the prisoner support group Ozgur Tayad.
More than 100 people are taking part in the fasts to push the government to stop transferring inmates to high-security prisons with small cells that prisoners claim leave them vulnerable to abuse by guards.
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