Turkish police round up 120 al-Qaida suspects

Turkish police launched a nationwide crackdown on suspected militants linked to the al-Qaida terror network, rounding up 120 people in simultaneous pre-dawn raids.

It was not clear if yesterday’s raids in 16 provinces would amount to a major blow to home-grown Islamic militants.

Yeni Safak newspaper this week reported that Turkish police had recently seized video recordings of alleged Turkish al-Qaida militants in Taliban camps in Afghanistan, as well as alleged plans for attacks on Turkish soldiers in Kabul and on police in Turkey.

Turkey, Nato’s sole Muslim member, took over the rotating command of the Nato peacekeeping operation in Kabul in November and doubled its troops to around 1,750. Turkey has also said it is ready to serve as an exit route for US troops’ withdrawal from Iraq.

Yesterday’s crackdown follows another raid on suspected militants in the cities of Ankara and Adana last week in which police rounded up and interrogated 40 people and reportedly seized documents detailing al-Qaida activities. Twenty-five of them were charged with membership in a terrorist organisation while the rest were released.

Those detained yesterday include a staff member of the Yuzunci Yil University in the eastern city of Van, who is suspected of recruiting students at the campus and other people through the internet and of sending them to Afghanistan for training, state news agency Anatolia reported. The suspect was identified only by his initials MEY.

Anatolia said other suspects included some local leaders, university students, and people believed to be spreading al-Qaida propaganda.

Police seized documents, computer hard disks and a number of weapons, it said.

Police would not comment on the arrests but experts said more operations against al-Qaida suspects were likely to follow.

“Each operation against al-Qaida leads to new information and widens the net,” said Nihat Ali Ozcan, a terrorism expert at the Economic Policy Research Institute in Ankara.

Home-grown Islamic militants tied to the al-Qaida carried out suicide bombings on the British consulate, a British bank and two synagogues in Istanbul, killing 58 people, in 2003. In 2008, an attack blamed on al-Qaida-affiliated militants outside the US Consulate in Istanbul left three attackers and three policemen dead.

Turkish authorities say dozens of Islamic militants have received training in Afghanistan, but al-Qaida’s austere and violent interpretation of Islam receives little public backing in Turkey.

Several other radical Islamic groups are active in Turkey, a predominantly Muslim, but officially secular country.

In June, Turkey’s court of appeals upheld life sentences for six militants accused in the 2003 deadly bombings, including Syrian Loa’i Mohammad Haj Bakr al-Saqa, who was charged with masterminding the bombings.

The court sentenced 33 others to between three years nine months and 18 years. It acquitted 15 of the suspects, citing a lack of evidence.