A Turkish court sentenced 20 members of the outlawed Turkish militant Islamist group Hizbullah to life imprisonment on Monday for killing civilians, ending a case that lasted 13 years. The group, which killed scores of people in the late 1980s and early 1990s, targeted mostly Kurds in Turkey's southeast region during fighting between Turkish security forces and PKK Kurdish separatist guerrillas.
The ruling is the first against the shadowy organisation, which has said it wants to overturn Turkey's secular state and introduce Islamic sharia law. Turkey's Hizbullah is not linked to the Lebanese group Hezbollah.
The 20 defendants were charged with murders between 1990 and 1994. Another two defendants were given a sentence of 16 years due to their young age when the murders were committed. |