video transcript

ROUGH CUT (NO REPORTER NARRATION) STORY: Kurds clashed with police in the southeastern Turkey on Friday during protests to mark the 14th anniversary of the capture of PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan. In the provinces of Cizre and Van protesters threw petrol bombs and stones at police as riot police used water cannons to disperse the crowd. Ocalan, who founded the armed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in 1978, was apprehended on February 15, 1999, while fleeing the Greek Embassy in Nairobi after a year-long international manhunt that took him from Syria to Russia, Italy, Greece and Kenya. He was sentenced to death later that year for treason, and his sentence was commuted to life in prison in 2002. The PKK launched a separatist campaign against the Turkish state in 1984 in which 40,000 people, mostly Kurds, have died. The U.S. and European Union brands the PKK as a terrorist group. Ocalan, is serving a life sentence in solitary confinement in an island jail off Istanbul.