Court releases all remaining jailed Hizbullah suspects

A Turkish court has released all the rest of remaining jailed suspects believed to be members of the outlawed Hizbullah organization, branded as the fundamentalist terrorist organization by the Turkish state.    The 14th İstanbul High Criminal Court has released six suspects, including Mehmet Bahattin Temel, who is believed to be chief of the terrorist organization’s Turkey branch and Hacı İnan. Jailed suspects Fikret Gültekin, Sait Şahin, Mehmet Şefik Temel Mehmet Eşin were also released pending trial by the court. The Turkish Hizbullah is a Kurdish, Sunni fundamentalist organization that arose in the late 1980s in southeastern Turkey. In the early 1990s, when the Turkish government's conflict with the 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. Turkish Hizbullah has no links to the Lebanese Shiite group, Hezbullah. 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. Source today zaman