The Assyrian Democratic Organization
AMSTERDAM – AP — Acting on a French warrant, Dutch police arrested a suspected member of a Kurdish rebel group who fled custody in Paris, the public prosecutor said Sunday.
The 29-year-old suspect, whose name was not released, had been in hiding with supporters of the Kurdish Workers Party, or PKK, in a small town outside The Hague. He was arrested in his car on a highway near the city late Saturday, said prosecution spokesman Wim de Bruin.
The man was arrested in France last February on suspicion of financing terrorism, and was found in possession of automatic weapons. He was released by a French judge and ordered to report weekly to the police, but the last time he appeared at a police station was in late August, de Bruin said. I
t was not clear how long he had been hiding in the Netherlands. The suspect was expected to be extradited to France within a few days, after a Dutch judge reviews the French request, De Bruin said. The PKK, which was founded in the 1970s for the creation of an independent Kurdistan in Turkey and Iraq, has been fighting the Turkish government since 1984 in a conflict that has cost thousands of lives.
It has been branded a terrorist organization by the European Union.
