A Turkish prisoner has died after a 464-day hunger strike against prison conditions, taking the death toll in the long-running protest to 57, the state-run Anatolian news agency said.
Hamide Ozturk, 32, died in a Turkish state hospital after refusing solid food to protest the transfer of prisoners from dormitory-style wards to cell-based prisons.
Like other protesters, she prolonged her life by drinking salted or sugared water and ingesting vitamins.
Ozturk was jailed in 1997 for taking part in a protest organised by the banned Revolutionary People's Liberation Party-Front (DHKP-C), the largest of Turkey's extreme left-wing guerrilla groups, the agency said.
Hundreds of prisoners and sympathisers began a hunger strike in October 2000 to try to force the government to abandon a new penitentiary system, which they say isolates prisoners and makes them vulnerable to police brutality.
Authorities say the new jails are necessary to break the grip of criminal or political gangs that run overcrowded wards.
Despite pressure from the European Union, which Turkey hopes to join, Ankara refuses to negotiate an end to the hunger strike, saying it is organised by "terrorists".
The EU also lists the DHKP-C as a "terrorist" organisation.
In December 2000, 30 prisoners and two soldiers were killed when security forces raided prisons to end the hunger strike.
Four people died last year when police raided an Istanbul neighbourhood where sympathisers and relatives of the prisoners had organised their own hunger strike.