The two lawmakers spent nearly four hours with Abdullah Ocalan, who is serving a life sentence in the prison island of Imrali, off the coast of Istanbul and where he has been jailed for 25 years.

It was the DEM opposition party's second meeting with the founder of the Kurdistan Workers' Party, which Ankara and its Western allies have branded a terror organisation over a bloody guerrilla war that began in 1984 and has since left more than 40,000 people dead.

DEM said they would put out a "written statement" on Thursday detailing their meeting.

Talks resumed after the head of Turkey's nationalist MHP party, Devlet Bahceli, invited Ocalan to parliament in October to disband the PKK, also putting on the table a possible early release.

Bahceli said Ocalan should "unconditionally declare the PKK is finished and turn over this bloody page."

After a first meeting with pro-Kurdish lawmakers in December, the 75-year-old Kurdish former leader had said that a rapprochement between Turks and Kurds was a "historical responsibility" and that he was "determined" to participate in the Ankara-led reconciliation effort.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said earlier this month that he was "cautiously optimistic," praising "significant progress" in the talks.

In 2015, a peace attempt initiated by Ankara shattered, unleashing a wave of violence in the country's predominently Kurdish southeast.

The United States, the European Union and the UK have also branded PKK a "terrorist" organisation for its decades-long armed insurgency against the Turkish state.