The 14th İstanbul High Criminal Court released six suspects, including Mehmet Bahattin Temel, who is believed to be the chief of the terrorist organization and Hacı İnan on Monday. Jailed suspects Fikret Gültekin, Sait Şahin, Mehmet Şefik Temel and Mehmet Eşin were also released pending trial by the court.
Speaking to judges at the İstanbul court, İnan said: “I have been jailed in an F-type prison [single or small cells to house gang leaders and militants for 12 years. How could a person in such conditions try demolishing the constitutional system? I worked together with the current president and prime minister before the 1980s. They have also suffered from the same issue. If they were from eastern Turkey, they would probably go through what I went through. The president is a religious person. Why should I terrorize him? There was pressure on Muslims in this country. However, this is not the case now. The public had been patient, and now has what it expected for years. I have memorized the Quran. I am a theologian. How could someone easily call a theologian a terrorist?”
The Turkish Hizbullah is a Kurdish, Sunni fundamentalist organization that arose in the late 1980s in southeast Turkey. In the early 1990s, when the government's conflict with the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) was at its most fierce, Hizbullah began attacking suspected PKK sympathizers. The group has mostly been inactive since the mid 1990s, when the group's top leaders were either killed or arrested in a major crackdown.
It was broken up, and its leaders were arrested in 2000 -- after police unearthed the bodies of more than 60 people the group had tortured and killed -- in raids across the country. The Turkish Hizbullah has no links to the Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah.
After a series of delays in their trials, 18 Hizbullah members were released in January this year after the introduction of new regulations limiting the period an accused person could be imprisoned without conviction.
