Leader of Outlawed Kurdish Rebel Group Held in Italy

In what Turkish authorities Friday called a major blow to this country’s Kurdish separatist movement, the leader of the bloody 14-year insurgency has been arrested in Rome by Italian police.

Abdullah Ocalan, the leader of the outlawed separatist PKK, as the Kurdistan Workers Party is known, was arrested late Thursday after getting off a plane from Moscow. Ocalan, 49, who is on Interpol’s list of most wanted criminals for his alleged role in the killings of several rebel deserters in Germany, was traveling on a forged Turkish passport, Italian police said Friday.

Turkish Prime Minister Mesut Yilmaz termed Ocalan’s arrest “the most crippling blow dealt so far to separatist terrorists” and “a cause for nationwide celebrations.”

But Yilmaz cautioned against complacency, saying that Turkey’s fight against the rebels will continue until “the very end.”

Yilmaz said Ankara has begun talks with Rome for the extradition of the rebel leader. He said he had “no doubts” that the Italian government will hand over Ocalan.

“It would not befit a NATO ally . . . to offer sanctuary to a bloody-handed murderer,” Yilmaz said.

However, European diplomats warned that Ankara’s extradition demands could run into difficulties because Ocalan will almost certainly face the death penalty in Turkey.

Although there have been no executions in Turkey since 1984, Italy has consistently refused to extradite suspects who risk capital punishment in their native country.

A warrant for Ocalan’s arrest is also outstanding in Germany, where the PKK leader has been accused of ordering the killings of the deserters in the 1980s and of being the ringleader of a terrorist organization. There is no death penalty in Germany.

German Federal Prosecutor Kay Nehm said he had not yet decided whether Germany should ask for the extradition of Ocalan. But such a request might relieve Italy of the burden of deciding whether to grant Ocalan asylum or extradite him to Turkey in the face of a possible death sentence.

Yilmaz claimed that his government’s pressure on Syria to expel Ocalan had played a crucial role in his capture. For the past 14 years, the PKK leader had been directing his rebels from Damascus, the Syrian capital, by walkie-talkies and cellular phones.

Last month, the Syrian government ordered him out of the country, and he allegedly fled to Moscow.

Ocalan, a college dropout with humble beginnings, founded the PKK in the late 1970s with a handful of Kurdish nationalists. Their aim was to establish an independent state run along rigidly Marxist lines for Turkey’s 12 million Kurds.

Nearly 30,000 people have died in the Kurdish conflict, which is concentrated in Turkey’s mainly Kurdish southeastern provinces. The State Department has put the PKK on its list of terrorist organizations because of the rebels’ brutal methods, including the killings of Kurdish civilians siding with the government.

But to many ethnic Kurds, the PKK is the only Kurdish movement to have succeeded in forcing the Turkish government to acknowledge the Kurds as a separate ethnic group. Until recently, the Kurds did not officially exist. They were referred to as “mountain Turks,” and their language was banned.

In recent years, the PKK has also mounted a highly successful public relations campaign aimed at gaining international support for its movement and now enjoys the backing of some left-wing European parties.

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Times staff writer Carol J. Williams in Berlin contributed to this report.