The indictment charged Ahmet Turk, the chairman of the Democratic Society Party (DTP), and his former co-chairwoman, Aysel Tugluk, with "praising crime or criminals" after Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan, serving a life sentence for treason, was mentioned in the leaflet.

It also accused the two politicians of violating the law on political parties because the leaflet in question was in Kurdish.

Even though Turkey has somewhat relaxed strict restrictions on the use of Kurdish in recent years, the law states that Turkish is the only language to be used by political parties in their writings and functions.

It was not immediately clear when the trial would begin.

Kurdish politicians in Turkey are routinely regarded with suspicion and often seen as instruments of Ocalan's Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which has been fighting a bloody campaign against the Ankara government since 1984 to give self-rule to the Kurds.

The DTP was set up in November with a pledge to try to resolve the Kurdish conflict through peaceful means, but it has so far failed to acheive any progress, with PKK violence mounting in the southeast.

It has come under fire for sympathizing with the PKK, which is blacklisted as a terror group by Turkey, the European Union and the United States, and dozens of its members face prosecution for supporting the rebels.

Last month, a Turkish prosecutor launched an investigation into whether the DTP's first convention amounted to propaganda for the PKK after participants waved Kurdish flags and brandished posters of Ocalan.