Robert Mueller, the director of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), was in Ankara on Wednesday. He met with Deputy Prime Minister Cemil Çiçek, Justice Minister Sadullah Ergin and Oğuz Kağan Köksal, the head of the Security General Directorate, during a one-day visit to the Turkish capital.
Turkish newspapers suggested on Thursday that Turkish officials asked Mueller for US support for the extradition of Murat Karayılan, the head of Kongra-Gel -- another name for the PKK -- and high-ranking PKK members Ali Rıza Altun and Zübeyir Aydar. All three were subject last month to a decision of the US Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control which is expected to deal a significant blow to the financial resources of the PKK. The US financial sanctions targeted three senior PKK leaders after designating them narcotics traffickers.
“Why should we just ask for three of them? We want all of them,” Deputy Prime Minister Çiçek told Today’s Zaman on Thursday, denying the aforementioned news reports.
“America is now our neighbor in Iraq. Iraq is now under US control and expecting such assistance [concerning PKK leaders] is our most natural right since the US is an ally that listed the PKK as a terrorist organization before all other countries in the world. It also stated that it will help us in that,” Çiçek, who also serves as the government’s spokesperson, said.
Çiçek ruled out arguments over sending PKK leaders in northern Iraq to a third country. “We told our counterparts that we want all 113 [commanders], not just three of them. Considering that PKK is a terrorist organization and its members are terrorists, we want all of them to either be tried in the country where they are captured or extradited to Turkey in order to be tried. No one is saying our demands are unfair, but we want action on this.”
In December 2005 Mueller visited Turkey to discuss al-Qaeda and PKK-related activities in the country. Since then, bilateral cooperation between the two countries against PKK activities has increased considerably.
Biometric information
A news report in the Turkish Radikal daily, meanwhile, said Thursday that Mueller had asked Turkish officials to share biometric information of everyone who uses ports and airports in Turkey -- a request that was rejected by Turkish officials, according to the report.
While asking for information regarding all suspected passengers’ route, destination and date of travel, Mueller also asked for the collection and sharing of all biometric data of passengers who travel through Turkey as part of counter-terrorism activities.
Yet, the Turkish side rejected this request since legislation in Turkey and international treaties to which it is party, including EU legislation with which Turkey is trying to harmonize its laws as a candidate country, is not comfortable with such data collection methods, Radikal said.
“We cannot share people’s personal information with other countries just on the grounds of suspicion,” Turkish officials told Mueller, the daily said. In February 2008, the FBI announced an award of a $1 billion, 10-year contract to Lockheed Martin to develop what is expected to be the world’s largest crime-fighting computer database of biometric information, including fingerprints, palm prints, iris patterns and face images.
At the time, FBI officials said the system would not expand the categories of people whose prints are collected: known criminals, known or suspected terrorists, or foreign visitors to the United States who have been convicted of a crime or an immigration violation. But additional types of biometric data, such as iris scans and face images, will be collected from criminals and terrorists, the officials had said. The system has been subject to criticism by privacy experts.
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