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Suspected Kurdish bomber risks life in jail over resort blast

ANKARA, June 20, 2006 (AFP) - A Turkish prosecutor is seeking a life sentence for an alleged separatist Kurdish militant for a bombing in a popular seaside resort last year that killed five people, two of them foreigners, the Anatolia news agency reported Tuesday.

The charge sheet, filed at a court in the Aegean resort of Kusadasi, calls for the suspect to be sentenced to life in prison, with no chance of parole, on five counts of premeditated murder and separatism, the agency reported.

It also calls for a separate prison sentence of 42 years for the injuries that the blast inflicted on 14 people.

A powerful telephone-triggered bomb hidden in a small bag exploded on July 16, 2005, in a minibus shuttling between downtown Kusadasi and a nearby beach popular with foreign tourists.

An Irish teenager and a British woman were among the victims. Five other Britons were hurt.

It was not immediately known when the trial would start.

The blast was claimed by a shadowy group, the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons, which officials say is a front for attacks on civilians of the separatist Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), blacklisted as a terrorist group by Turkey, the European Union and the United States.

It was the deadliest attack claimed so far by TAK, which often threatens to target Turkey's booming tourism industry, a vital source of foreign revenue.

The suspect planted the remote-control bomb under a seat in the minibus, then got off and made a call from from a telephone booth to detonate the device, according to the indictement.

He managed to escape after the blast and reportedly sneaked into neighboring northern Iraq, where thousands of PKK militants have found refuge over the past several years.

The suspect was detained earlier this year in the southeastern province of Elazig after returning to Turkey.

The Kurdish conflict in Turkey has claimed some 37,000 lives since the PKK took up arms for self-rule in the predominantly Kurdish southeast in 1984.