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Kurdish party leader jailed in Turkey for 'praising' rebel leader

DIYARBAKIR, Turkey, March 6, 2007 (AFP) - A Turkish court Tuesday jailed the chairman of the country's main Kurdish party for six months over remarks deemed to praise jailed Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan.

The court in Diyarbakir, the biggest city in the mainly Kurdish southeastern Turkey, found Democratic Left Party (DTP) leader Ahmet Turk guilty of "praising a criminal offender."

Lawyers for Turk said they would appeal the sentence.

The case against Turk was initiated after he made a speech in Diyabakir last year denouncing the solitary confinement of Ocalan on the prison island of Imrali in northwestern Turkey since his capture in 1999.

Ocalan is the head of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which has fought for Kurdish self-rule in the southeast since 1984, in a conflict that has claimed more than 37,000 lives.

He is serving a life sentence for treason and separatism.

Kurdish politicians are routinely suspected by Ankara of supporting the PKK and are often prosecuted for alleged links to the group which has been blacklisted by Ankara, the United States and the European Union.