Turkish police raid offices of Kurdish party in Istanbul

Turkish police on Friday raided the offices of the main pro-Kurdish party in central Istanbul, making arrests and seizing documents.

Riot police blocked the entry to the street where the Beyoglu district office of the Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) is located while anti-terror police conducted a search, an AFP photographer said.

Turkish media reports said that several people were detained in the two-hour morning operation, including the co-chair of the Beyoglu branch of the HDP, Rukiye Demir. Police said six people were detained in all.

The lawyer for the party's branch, Levent Piskin, denounced the raid which he says was linked to a  murder case that had no connection with the party.

"Prosecutors took a decision to carry out a search in relation to a murder with which neither the party nor the district branch has any connection," he said quoted by the Dogan news agency.

The authorities have stepped up legal pressure on the HDP as the military wages a relentless campaign to flush out Kurdish militants from inside towns in the southeast.

Prosecutors have launched investigations against the co-leaders of the HDP -- Selahattin Demirtas and Figen Yuksekdag -- and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has called for their parliamentary immunity to be removed.

The authorities accuse the HDP of acting as the political arm of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), classified a terror group by Turkey and its Western allies. The HDP vehemently denies this.

The army said that two Turkish soldiers were killed Friday by PKK attacks in military operations in the town of Cizre and the Sur district of the city of Diyarbakir that have both been under curfew in the last weeks.

The length and intensity of the army operations has caused alarm, with the HDP saying that dozens of civilians have been killed in the southeast in the last weeks.