Interpol lifts warrant for Sociologist Pınar Selek

ANF – News Desk 22.02.2014  – Socialist Party MP Philippe Bies said on Thursday that Interpol had removed Pınar Selek from their red notice list. According to the DNA newspaper published in the Alsace region, this decision means Turkey’s request for Selek’s extradition has now been annulled by Interpol.

The newspaper reported that: “If there is no red notice then

Pınar Selek, who has lived as a political refugee in France for years, need no longer fear arrest.”Selek is continuing her studies at the University of Strasbourg and is expected to present her PHD thesis on 7 March.In 1998 Pinar Selek was arrested for alleged propaganda for PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party); she spent two and a half years in prison where she was severely tortured. It was only in custody that she realized she was being charged with having committed a bomb attack on the Egyptian Bazaar in Istanbul on behalf of the PKK. After an eight year trial Pinar was acquitted in 2006. By then, numerous experts had confirmed that the explosion on the Bazaar had not been caused by a bomb but by a faulty liquid gas bottle. The main witness for the prosecution admitted that his testimony was obtained under torture. At the beginning of last year, the case was referred to Ankara ’s Court of Appeals because of alleged procedural errors. There, the acquittal was quashed, against which decision the senior public prosecutor of that same court appealed, saying that as there was no bomb involved in the explosion, it could not have been planted by somebody. However, the court did not accept the appeal of the senior public prosecutor. On 8 February, 2010 the notorious 9th criminal division of the Court of Appeals in Ankara demanded life imprisonment for Pinar Selek.