First they started torturing me, then they started asking me questions, saying I was a terrorist,'' he said, wrapped up in dirty white sweater and baggy trousers. Kurdish refugees fleeing dire poverty and bitter fighting further east have poured into the city and its environs. Their numbers are now swelling by 20,000 a month and Kurds now make up 30 percent of the province's 1.2 million population.
Government officials say torture in Turkey is neither widespread nor systematic.
Some say they were tortured in the southeast, where most of the estimated 14,000 deaths in the conflict have occurred. But others were picked up in and around Adana. The refugee influx has turned this fertile cotton-growing region into a hotbed of Kurdish resentment and radicalism, residents said. Last month, a man was killed when unknown gunmen raked a cafe with machinegun fire. Security forces have made at least three round-ups of suspected Kurdish guerrillas in the area since December.