A Turkish company has cut down thousands of trees to make way for a power plant in the western town of Soma, in a move that angered activists.

Kolin Group — one of Turkey's biggest conglomerates — uprooted 6,000 olive trees on Friday to make room for a coal power plant in Soma's Yirca village, where locals have been guarding the grove for more than 52 days.

A fight erupted after security guards for the company tried to remove the protesting villagers from the olive grove, Hurriyet daily reported on Saturday.

The guards dragged some of the villagers several meters, forced them onto a truck and locked them inside a hut some four kilometers (2.5 miles) away from the construction site.

One of the villagers suffered a head injury from a tear gas canister fired by a security guard, Hurriyet said.

Television footage showed the village headman Mustafa Akin weeping live on air and elderly women hugging the trees set to be cut down.

"Those trees were my children," a 80-year-old women was quoted as saying by Hurriyet.

Just hours after the confrontation, a Turkish court thrown out a decision permitting the company -- which is close to the government -- to seize control of the grove. But it was too late, as the company had already uprooted thousands of trees.

The environmentalist organization Greenpeace denounced the tree-felling as a "legal scandal" and said it would "bring to justice those responsible for this disaster."

"The struggle in Yirca is... to prevent irreversible damage to the environment. The fight is not over yet," Greenpeace's Mediterranean lawyer Deniz Bayram said.

According to Greenpeace, the area around the small village is already polluted by the "second dirtiest coal power plant in Europe". The plant is government-owned.

In May, a explosion followed by the collapse of a coal mine at Soma killed the 301 miners in Turkey's worst-ever industrial accident.

Turkey has routinely been criticized for its poor environmental record, which has worsened during a period of frenzied construction.

A peaceful sit-in to prevent hundred of trees from being cut down in a park redevelopment scheme in Istanbul evolved into nationwide protests against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who was then prime minister.

Erdogan has been widely ridiculed for claiming that more than three billion trees have been planted since he came to power in 2002.