By Ivan Watson, CNN
Istanbul, Turkey (CNN) — Grief and rage erupted on the streets of Turkey’s largest city after a 15-year-old boy struck in the head by a tear gas canister died Tuesday morning in a hospital.
Much of the anger was focused on Turkey’s embattled prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
A crowd chanted “fascist government, Erdogan killer,” as Berkin Elvan’s coffin was carried through the streets of the working-class Istanbul neighborhood his family calls home.
Some bystanders wept in the freezing, pouring rain.
President Abdullah Gul spoke with the boy’s father Monday and was saddened by Tuesday’s news, according to the semiofficial Anadolu news agency.
“I extend my condolences to his family. I share their pain,” he said.
Elvan was only 14 when he was critically wounded last summer, at the height of a wave of anti-government protests that erupted across Istanbul and other Turkish cities.
His parents said he left home on the morning of June 16, 2013, to buy a loaf of bread. Less than 15 minutes later, neighbors arrived, telling them their son had been wounded.
The boy suffered blunt trauma to the head. According to a report by Human Rights Watch, an eyewitness said the child was hit by a police tear gas canister.
For the next nine months, Elvan lay in a hospital bed in a coma.
When Elvan’s mother attempted to make a public statement about her son’s ordeal in central Istanbul in July 2013, CNN journalists witnessed and filmed Turkish riot police hitting demonstrators with pepper spray and beating one man with a club in an apparent effort to break up the demonstration.
More recently, riot police used tear gas to disperse demonstrators holding a vigil outside the hospital where Elvan was being treated. Members of the family said the boy wasted away to a weight of 16 kilograms (about 35 pounds) during his nine-month-long coma.
Source: CNN