Posted on 04/08/2004 5:59:08 PM PDT by avg_freeper
STANBUL, April 2 (Reuters) - Police in five European states detained 63 people in raids against a Turkish far-left militant group, an official said on Friday, in a security sweep Turkish media reports said was linked to a NATO summit in June.
Istanbul will host leaders of the Atlantic alliance, including U.S. President George W. Bush, on June 28-29 and some newspapers said authorities wanted to rein in militant groups before then.
Police and interior ministry officials were not immediately available to comment on the reports.
The group targeted in Thursday's raids, the Revolutionary People's Liberation Party-Front (DHKP-C), is known to be hostile to NATO, the United States and the Turkish establishment. It has claimed responsibility for bomb attacks in Turkey.
Turkish police spokesman Ramazan Er told a news conference in Ankara 40 people were detained in Turkey and 23 abroad.
"We were in contact with German, Italian, Dutch and Belgian police for one year under a security cooperation agreement and had assessment meetings with the security forces of these countries," the state Anatolian news agency quoted him saying.
Turkish mass-circulation newspaper Milliyet said the raids in Istanbul targeted media outlets and associations believed to be linked to the DHKP-C.
"Terror clean-up ahead of NATO," a Milliyet headline said. "It was stated that the goal of the operation...was to bring terror actions under control before the NATO summit," it said, without giving a source.
Er told reporters the police were targeting all militant groups and had detained 143 people in raids against "religious terror groups" since the start of this year. The DHKP-C has no known links to radical Islamic groups.
Last year it 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 U.S.-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.
Last November, suicide bombers killed more than 60 people in four attacks in Istanbul, Turkey' largest city and business hub, which the government blamed on Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network.
The European Union, which Turkey aspires to join, has placed the DHKP-C on its blacklist of terrorist organisations.
Interesting WOT news I haven't heard about elsewhere.
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