Small Group Isolation in F-type Prisons and the Violent Transfers of Prisoners to Sincan, Kandira, and Edirne Prisons

On December 19, 2000, thirty prisoners and two gendarmes were killed when some ten thousand armed soldiers went into twenty Turkish prisons to break up a nonviolent protest by inmates and transfer them to the newly constructed F-type prisons. Accounts received by Human Rights Watch from released prisoners and prisoners' relatives suggest that disproportionate force may have been used during the operation, and that in some cases prisoners may have been deliberately killed. Information from the same sources, corroborated by medical evidence, indicates that hundreds of prisoners were ill-treated and tortured during and after the transfer to the new prisons.