Police arrested 1,374 people yesterday in an increased effort to stem the flow of illegal migrants through Turkey to western Europe.
The Anatolian news agency said more than 1,000 of them were citizens of other countries. The arrests were part of a sweeping operation around Istanbul in the early hours of yesterday morning.
Confirming the report, an officer at the Istanbul police headquarters said that 210 of those detained were from the mainly Kurdish north of Iraq. Others were from Azerbaijan, Iran and various African and Asian countries.
"Some of them were arrested for lack of identification, some on suspicion that they were intending to be smuggled out of the country and others for different reasons," he said.
Processing all of them would take a long time, the officer said.
Turkey has been under heavy pressure from Europe to tighten its borders since a wave of migrants, many of them Kurds from Turkey, Iraq and Iran, began arriving on the coast of Italy in recent weeks.
Raids last week on cheap hotels in Istanbul and checks on trucks travelling toward the Greek border led to the arrests of hundreds of other would-be illegal migrants.
The migrants, predominantly young men from the Middle East and Asia, use Turkey's land border with Greece and long Mediterranean coastline to attempt to cross into wealthy countries of the European Union. Istanbul, in the west of Turkey, acts as a staging post for the final leap into Europe.
Some pay smugglers large sums of hard currency to ferry them to the Italian or Greek coasts while others try to sneak over the land border with Greece.
A number of European countries and rights groups have linked the migration to a 13-yearold conflict with Kurdish rebels in south-east Turkey in which more than 27,000 people have died.
But Ankara says the Turkish Kurds among the exodus are almost all economic migrants and suffer no persecution in Turkey.
"This is not an example of refugees, it is an example of people looking for work. The vast majority are people going for that reason," Mr Aydin Arslan, governor of the emergency rule region in force in parts of south-east Turkey, said late on Saturday.
Human rights activists said they expected a solution today following negotiations to end a 52day hunger strike by Kurdish rebel prisoners over overcrowding at a jail in eastern Turkey. "I spoke to my colleagues at the prison and they say we have reached a positive point. We expect a solution today or tomorrow," a spokesman for the Human Rights Association said.
Doctors in the city of Erzurum were treating three severely ill inmates against their will who had been removed from the jail after coming close to death on Friday, he said.
The three were among 370 Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) prisoners on hunger strike at two jails in Erzurum. Most of the prisoners are on a so-called rotating hunger strike in which they fast for several days before eating briefly and then going on hunger strike again.