Separately, a Paris court sentenced 11 Kurds to jail terms of between three months and five years for their part in petrol bomb attacks on two Turkish bars and a cultural centre in Bordeaux in March and April 2007.

In both cases, the suspects are alleged to be members or supporters of the banned Kurdish Workers Party (PKK), an armed group that is fighting for an independent Kurdish homeland in southeastern Turkey.

Judicial sources in Marseille told AFP that the seven suspects arrested there were accused of threatening, and in some cases assaulting, members of the port city's Kurdish community as part of a fund-raising racket.

Anti-terror police seized documents while serving the arrest warrants.

The Bordeaux case represented the first time a French court had convicted PKK cadres -- or in this case the members of its youth wing -- in a terrorist case, according to the state prosecutor's office.

Blacklisted as a terror group by the European Union and the United States, the PKK took up arms for self-rule in Turkey's Kurdish-majority southeast in 1984, triggering a conflict that has claimed some 44,000 lives.

In addition to having underground cells in Turkey and rear bases in the mountains of northern Iraq, its supporters have a secret network among the many Kurdish immigrant communities in European cities.