The 51-year-old man arrived in the western German city of Karlsruhe on Tuesday and appeared before an investigating judge who ordered that he be arrested, it said.

The man was detained in Vienna at the beginning of the year on an international arrest warrant issued by German authorities eight years ago.

He is believed to have been the leader of the PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party) in the northern German cities of Hamburg, Kiel and Bremen in 1993 and 1994 and to have taken part in a spate of attacks, the prosecutor's office said.

The PKK carried out a campaign of firebombings on German and Turkish institutions in Germany in the mid-1990s.

Its bloody separatist campaign in southeastern Turkey has claimed nearly 37,000 lives since 1984.