Ankara - Prosecutors in Turkey are seeking to increase a jail sentence that was handed down to Leyla Zana, a former parliamentarian and winner of the European Parliament's 1995 Sakharov Peace Prize, from 10 to 45 years, the Anadolu news agency reported on Friday. A court in the south-eastern city of Diyarbakir last month ruled that Zana had spread "terrorist propaganda" in a number of speeches made in recent years, and that she was a member of the outlawed Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK), sentencing her to ten years in prison.
In particular the court found that Zana's repeated calls in speeches made in Diyarbakir, the towns of Batman and Bingol, and at the European Parliament for PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan to be freed from prison and her calls for him to be involved in solving the Kurdish problem was proof of her "organic" links with the PKK.
Appealing against what they called the leniency of the punishment, prosecutors are to now seek that Zana be re-tried on the grounds that she should have been given prison sentences of five years for each of the nine speeches she had made.
Zana is currently free pending the decision by the appeals court in Ankara to uphold her original sentence or to order a re-trial.
Zana and three other Kurdish former members of parliament were imprisoned in 1994 after being found guilty of belonging a terrorist organization in a trial that human rights groups complained was unfair, and with the convictions based on witness statements allegedly obtained under torture.
In 2001 the European Court of Human Rights ordered a retrial that eventually took place in 2004, again finding the four guilty. After almost 10 years in prison the four were released when an appeals court prosecutor called for another retrial and for the convictions to be quashed on a technicality.
In 2007 the four were again found guilty but sentenced to time served. The current prosecution began in September 2008.
Ankara blames the separatist PKK for the deaths of more than 35,000 people since the early 1980s when the PKK began its fight for independence or autonomy for the mainly Kurdish-populated south-east of Turkey.
The PKK is considered by the United States and the European Union to be a terrorist group.
