ANKARA, 25 January 2005 — An undersea earthquake measuring 5.5 on the Richter scale spread panic along parts of Turkey’s Mediterranean coast overnight, but there were no reports of casualties or damage, officials said yesterday. Many residents of the popular resort town of Kas were brought out into the streets when the quake hit at 00:36 a.m. (2236 GMT on Sunday), at a point some 50 kilometers offshore, seismologists said.

The seismological institute in the French city of Strasbourg said the epicenter was at 36 degrees latitude north and 29.9 degrees of longitude east. The Istanbul-based Kandilli Seismological Institute said there were no casualties or damage in the quake, Anatolia news agency reported.

But many local residents in Fethiye, another resort on the coast of southwestern Anatolia, spent the night outside for fear of aftershocks. The region is also close to Greek territory. The small Greek island of Megisti is just off Kas, and the larger island of Rhodes is located further to the west. Earthquakes are frequent in Turkey. In 1999 some 20,000 people were killed in two massive quakes in the northwest of the country.

Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono urged Turks to be more generous toward his country as it recovers after the tsunami disaster, in an interview in the Turkish newspaper Zaman published yesterday. “We would like the Turkish state and people to be more sensitive to the scourge that has befallen us,” the newspaper quoted him as saying.

Indonesia was by far the worst hit of the Indian Ocean nations devastated by massive waves that pounded their coastlines following a Dec. 26 earthquake off the island of Sumatra. Some 174,000 people died in Indonesia out of a total of 227,000 across the region.

In the interview, Yudhoyono recalled the bonds between Indonesia, which has the biggest Muslim population in the world, and Turkey, which also has a large Muslim majority, and urged Ankara “to do more.” Turkish government aid for the tsunami relief effort amounts to about $5 million, while the Turkish Red Crescent has collected some $5.3 million.

Meanwhile, the German authorities have detained a senior member of a rebel Kurdish organization, triggering protests by Kurdish exiles in Europe, a Kurdish news agency reported yesterday. Remzi Kartal, a deputy chairman of KONGRA-GEL, the new name of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) that has been engaged in a bloody war for self-rule in southeast Turkey, was detained in Nuremberg on Saturday, the Germany-based MHA news agency, which is close to the PKK, said on its website.

Reports from Berlin said the Nuremberg prosecutor’s office yesterday confirmed the arrest on an international warrant of “a Turkish national,” but gave no other details. The PKK is considered a terrorist organization by the EU and the United States, as well as Turkey. Kartal, wanted by Ankara, was a member of the Turkish Parliament in the early 1990s.

An association of Kurdish dissidents in exile in Europe condemned the arrest, saying it was part of a recent “arbitrary” anti-Kurdish campaign in Germany. “Those who caught Remzi Kartal ... like a criminal see all Kurds as a danger,” the Confederation of Kurdish Associations in Europe said in a statement, describing Kartal as “a Kurdish politician whose long-standing work is well known to the public.”

“We reject such an approach and will wage a legal struggle against it,” said the statement, carried by MHA. Kartal was among a group of Kurdish members of Parliament who fled Turkey in 1994 after the authorities cracked down on their Democracy Party on charges that it was collaborating with the PKK rebellion. Four others, including human rights award winner Leyla Zana, ended up in prison and were released only last June, pending a review of their sentences. Kartal, who was based in Brussels, was in Germany to attend a cultural function when he was detained at a Nuremberg train station, MHA said.