ANKARA: Tens of thousands of Turks took to the streets here on Thursday, chanting anti-Islamist slogans and calling on the government to resign as a deadly fundamentalist attack on senior judges landed Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the hot seat.

The attack on the country’s top administrative court underscored a deepening rift between the secularist establishment and the Islamist-rooted government, often accused of trying to reinforce the role of religion in politics and daily life in secular Turkey, which is seeking to join the European Union.

“Turkey is secular, it will remain secular,” “Mullahs, go to Iran,” the protesters shouted, brandishing flags and portraits of modern Turkey’s founding father Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.

The scene repeated itself at several ceremonies for a senior judge who was killed on Wednesday when a gunman shouting ‘I am a soldier of Allah’ sprayed gunfire at a meeting room at the Council of State, wounding four other judges.

The gunman, 29-year-old Istanbul lawyer Alparslan Arslan, said he wanted to ‘punish’ the Council for a February ruling that upheld a ban on women wearing the Islamic headscarf in public institutions and universities, court officials said.

Anger simmered at the funeral of judge Mustafa Yucel Ozbilgin, 64, where protesters booed ministers, hurled plastic bottles at them and called Mr Erdogan, off on a trip to southern Turkey, ‘a murderer’.

Media reports said Deputy Prime Minister Abdullatif Sener was punched in the shoulders and escorted to safety by policemen forming a human chain around him.

The unprecedented shooting sparked accusations that the government had emboldened anti-secular extremists with its opposition to the headscarf ban and harsh criticism of court rulings confirming it.

The secularist establishment, including the powerful army, sees the headscarf as a symbol of militancy.

Scores of military officers, including senior generals, attending the funeral were greeted with ovations from the crowd, bringing back memories of political turmoil in 1997 when the army forced Turkey’s first Islamist-led government to resign.

Mr Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) is an offshoot of the ousted and now-banned party, but has disowned its origins, describing itself as simply ‘conservative’.

Earlier, some 25,000 people marched to Ataturk’s mausoleum, led by the president of the Council of State, Sumru Cortoglu, and other senior jurists.

Senior ministers met security and intelligence officials in what Justice Minister Cemil Cicek described as a government effort ‘to do its best’ to help the investigation.

“We are asking for several days of democratic patience,” he said. “We should not allow polarization in society.”

But harsh criticism poured on the government.

“If you create an unhealthy climate in the country, malignant germs will naturally proliferate,” columnist Melih Asik wrote in the liberal daily Milliyet.

“If you act not as the prime minister of the entire country but as the leader of one particular segment, if you pick fights with constitutional institutions instead of defending them, the consequences will naturally be serious,” he said.—AFP