Turkey's pro-Kurd party to meet jailed PKK leader

ISTANBUL: A delegation from Turkey’s main pro-Kurdish DEM party is due on Saturday to visit jailed PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan, who is serving life on a prison island off Istanbul, a party source said.

“The delegation left in the morning,” the source told AFP, without elaborating how they would travel to the island for security reasons.

The visit would be the party’s first in almost 10 years.

DEM’s predecessor, the HDP party, last met Ocalan in April 2015.

On Friday, the government approved DEM’s request to visit Ocalan, who founded the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) nearly half a century ago and has languished in solitary confinement since 1999.

The PKK is regarded as a “terror” organisation by Turkey and most of its Western allies, including the United States and European Union.

Detained 25 years ago in a Hollywood-style operation by Turkish security forces in Kenya after years on the run, Ocalan was sentenced to death.

He escaped the gallows when Turkey abolished capital punishment in 2004 and is spending his remaining years in an isolation cell on the Imrali prison island south of Istanbul.

Saturday’s rare visit became possible after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s nationalist ally, MHP party leader Devlet Bahceli, invited Ocalan to come to parliament to renounce “terror”, and to disband the militant group.

Erdogan backed the appeal as a “historic window of opportunity”.