ISTANBUL, 2 April 2004 — Police in five states across Europe detained 53 people yesterday in coordinated dawn raids against Turkey’s biggest far-left militant group, and Greece arrested another man suspected of links with the organization.
Security forces in the Philippines also arrested four Turkish nationals suspected of having ties with international “terror groups”, but a military spokesman there said there was no link with the European operations.
A Turkish Interior Ministry official said 37 people were detained in Turkey and 16 more were held in swoops in Italy, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands, targeted at Turkey’s Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party-Front (DHKP-C).
“The operations were carried out in cooperation with the other forces,” the official said.
The DHKP-C, also know as Devrimci Sol (Revolutionary Left), is against the United States, NATO and the Turkish establishment and has said it was responsible for bomb attacks in Turkey. It has no known links to radical Islamic groups.
Prosecutors in the central Italian city of Perugia said they coordinated an early morning, pan-European operation against DHKP-C after an 18-month investigation. Five people were arrested in Italy — two Turks and three Italians — and further arrest warrants were issued for suspects living elsewhere.
“As far as we know there are no connections with religious terrorism, but this is only the beginning of the investigation and we have a lot to learn,” prosecutor Nicola Miriano told a news conference.
Italian police said they tapped 56,000 hours of phone calls that revealed links between the Turkish group and Italian anti-capitalist militants.
Dutch authorities said police mounted five separate raids in Amsterdam and the southern towns of Ettenleur and Maassluis, but did not arrest anyone.
Wim de Bruin, a spokesman for the Dutch public prosecutor’s office, said police seized material such as computers, mobile phones and documents on suspicion that Dutch and Turkish nationals were running communications for a militant group.
Greek police said they separately arrested a German citizen of Kurdish origin on suspicion of links to the same group.
They said 30-year-old Sinan Buzkurt was wanted in Germany, which had issued an international warrant for his arrest, and Greek authorities would consider whether to extradite him.
Buzkut’s arrest came by chance as he was initially held by border guards on trafficking charges and police only later became aware of the German warrant, said an official at the prosecutor’s office in the northern town of Komotini.
Greece has been tightening security on its long borders ahead of the Olympics in August.
The DHKP-C last year claimed responsibility for small bomb blasts at a McDonald’s restaurant and a state-run hotel in Istanbul, which it said were a protest against the US-led war in Iraq. Nobody was hurt in those attacks.
The group also said it carried out a suicide bomb attack in September 2001 in Istanbul that killed two police officers and an Australian tourist, as well as the bomber.
