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| Europe | |
| Europe sweep on Turkish extremists | |
| 2004-04-01 | |
| A series of arrests have been made in co-ordinated raids across Europe targeting a Turkish extremist group. Istanbul police arrested 25 suspected members of the Revolutionary People's Liberation Party-Front, DHKP-C, which has carried out many attacks in Turkey. Another 16 were held in Italy, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands. The group, which aims to topple the Turkish government and replace it with a Marxist one, has been banned by the US and the European Union. It has admitted carrying out two suicide bomb attacks in Istanbul in September 2001 that killed three policemen and one Australian citizen and wounded 28 people, mostly police officers. The illegal group has carried out other bombings since 2001. The early morning raids come after a year of investigation into the activities of the group - begun by Turkish and German police. German and Italian investigators subdequently discovered that the group was also active in the Netherlands and Belgium and co-ordinated the European crackdown outside Turkey, a Turkish interior ministry spokesman said. The Italian raid centred on the town of Perugia - which has a university for foreigners. In a news conference, the Perugia chief prosecutor said that telephone and wire taps during the investigation had revealed the flow of funds, arms and information among supporters of the group in many European countries. Three Italian and two Turkish nationals were held in Italy. One of the Turkish nationals was said to have headed the DHKP-C cell - which was helped by local Italian anti-imperialist campaigners, Italian authorities say. Among the Italians arrested is Moreno Pasquinelli, spokesman for the Anti-imperialist Camp - a group opposed to the US-led occupation of Iraq. They had been gathering funds to finance the Iraqi resistance to the occupation. "We support the armed struggle in Iraq. Our money is to help them, it doesn't matter to us if they use it buy weapons, Kalashnikovs, or medicines for people," Mr Pasquinelli told the BBC last year.
Additional from Italy: Ten remands for cusody for criminal association with the aim of international terrorism were carried out, five of which in Italy to members belonging to the Dhkp-c cell, the revolutionary party for the liberation of the people, a Turkish Marxist-Leninist organisation which surfaced in 1992 after the split of the same movement into two ideological currents. The Italian cell has found much support, collaboration and the supply of means and money in Perugia and had at its helm three Italian citizens with marked Marxist-Leninist connotations and anti-imperalist beliefs. This is how a major international anti-terrorist operation took place this morning which involved a series of arrests, other than in the Perugia area also in Turkey, Belgium and Holland. Searches were also carried out in the houses of those arrested, as well as the confiscation of internet sites, a tool with which they sent each other encrypted messages which the anti-subversion department in Rome is working on to decipher. | |
| Posted by:Steve |