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Four Kurds jailed for life over deadly Turkey
bombing
8.5.2007 |
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May 8, 2007
ISTANBUL, ,-- Four Kurdish militants,
including one woman, were sentenced Monday to life
in jail for a 1999 petrol bomb attack on an Istanbul
shopping mall that killed 13 people, Anatolia news
agency reported.
The court said the attack was part of a violent
separatist campaign to carve out an independent
Kurdish state in southeast Turkey.
It also stripped the three men, who along with the
woman had denied the charges, of any chance of
parole.
The attack on March 13, 1999 occurred amid a wave of
Kurdish violence following the capture of Kurdish
rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan in Kenya.
The assailants hurled molotov cocktails at the
perfume department near the entrance of the mall,
sparking a fire that blocked the only exit and
quickly engulfed the six-storey building in Kadikoy
district, on Istanbul's Asian side.
The victims were either burnt to death or
suffocated. The mall, packed with weekend shoppers,
lacked a fire escape.
Ocalan, the leader of the rebel Kurdistan Workers'
Party (PKK), was condemned to death for separatism
in June 1999, but his sentence was commuted to life
in jail after Turkey abolished capital punishment as
part of reforms to boost its bid to join the
European Union.
Since then, Ankara has also granted its sizeable
Kurdish minority a degree of cultural freedoms.
Kurdish activists, however, remain unsatisfied and
the PKK, listed as a terrorist group by Ankara and
much of the international community, refuses to
disarm.
The conflict has claimed more than 37,000 lives
since 1984 when the PKK launched its armed campaign
for self-rule in the Kurdish-majority southeast.
AFP
** The use of the term "Kurdistan" is vigorously
rejected due to its alleged political implications
by the Republic of Turkey, which does not recognize
the existence of a "Turkish Kurdistan" Southeast
Turkey.
Others estimate over 40 million Kurds live in
Big Kurdistan (Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Iran, Armenia),
which covers an area as big as France, about half of
all Kurds which estimate to 20 million live in
Turkey.
Turkey is home to over 25 million ethnic Kurds, some
of whom openly sympathise with the Kurdish PKK for a
Kurdish homeland in the country's mainly Kurdish
southeast of Turkey.
Before August 2002, the Turkish government placed
severe restrictions on the use of Kurdish language,
prohibiting the language in education and broadcast
media.
The Kurdish alphabet is still not recognized
in Turkey, and use of the Kurdish letters X, W, Q
which do not exist in the Turkish
alphabet has led to judicial persecution in 2000 and
2003
The Kurdish flag flown officially in Iraqi Kurdistan
but unofficially flown by Kurds in Armenia. The flag
is banned in Iran, Syria, and Turkey where flying it
is a criminal offence"
Southeastern Turkey:
North Kurdistan ( Kurdistan-Turkey)
wikipedia
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