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AFP
Ankara
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Saturday accused Turkey's main opposition party of siding with terrorism, as a three-week"march for justice" led by its chief advanced towards its endpoint of Istanbul.
Some analysts have seen the 450-kilometre (280 miles) trek from Ankara to Istanbul led by Republican People's Party (CHP) leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu as a significant challenge to Erdogan but the Turkish strongman has regarded it with disdain.
The CHP leader pressed on with the march accompanied by thousands of supporters despite blistering heat of 37 degrees Celsius (98.6 degrees Fahrenheit). He dismissed Erdogan's comments as"fitting for a dictator".
Kilicdaroglu began the march on June 15 after former journalist turned CHP lawmaker Enis Berberoglu was sentenced to 25 years in jail on charges of leaking classified information to a newspaper.
Marching without party insignia and simply a sign with the word"justice" in Turkish, he has been followed by thousands every day and plans to end the march on July 9 with a mass rally outside Berberoglu's prison in the Istanbul district of Maltepe.
"If you start protests to protect terrorists and those who support terrorism -- when it did not occur to you to take part in anti-terror demonstrations -- then you cannot convince anyone that your objective is justice," Erdogan said.
The president told a meeting of his ruling party that the line represented by the CHP"had gone beyond being a political opposition and taken on a different proportion."
Accusing the CHP of sympathising with Kurdish militants and the alleged mastermind of the July 15 failed coup, he said the road taken by Kilicdaroglu was"the way to Qandil and Pennsylvania".
The leadership of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) is based in the Qandil mountain of northern Iraq while the alleged coup mastermind, the preacher Fethullah Gulen, is based in Pennsylvania. He denies the allegations.
