ISTANBUL, 5 April 2005 — A state prosecutor demanded life imprisonment yesterday for an Islamist charged with a plot to crash an aircraft loaded with explosives into a gathering of Turkey’s political and military leaders.
Metin Kaplan, nicknamed the “Caliph of Cologne”, was handed to Turkey by Germany last October after he served four years in jail for ordering the murder of a rival religious leader.
He is charged in Turkey in connection with a 1998 plan to crash the aircraft into the mausoleum of Kemal Ataturk, founder of the modern Turkish Republic, when the country’s political and military leadership were attending a national event.
Turkey strictly separates state and religion, and Ataturk’s mausoleum in the capital Ankara is revered by many Turks as a symbol of those secular values.
The state Anatolian news agency quoted the prosecutor as telling an Istanbul court that Kaplan should serve a life jail sentence for attempting to change Turkey’s “constitutional order by armed force”.
Kaplan headed a Cologne-based group known as the Kalifatstaat (Capliphate State), outlawed by Berlin in 2001.
Germany only agreed to extradite him after Turkey scrapped the death penalty and introduced other human rights reforms as part of its drive to join the European Union.
Kaplan’s trial started last December and is expected to be lengthy. Court cases in Turkey often take years with hearings set months apart.
Meanwhile, nine Kurdish rebels and a Turkish soldier have been killed in the past five days in fighting in mainly Kurdish southeastern Turkey, officials said yesterday.
The clash erupted when a group of members of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), now also known as KONGRA-GEL, was surrounded by soldiers in mountains in the province of Sirnak during a security operation, the office of the local governor said. One militant surrendered to the security forces.
The operation also resulted in the seizure of weapons and ammunition in caves used by the militants, the statement said.
