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.