Salih Muslim, a former leader of Syria’s Kurdish PYD, was arrested in Czech Republic on Saturday at Turkey’s request.<\/p>\n
Turkey has submitted a request to extradite a\u00a0former Kurdish Syrian leader\u00a0from the Czech Republic, with a file explaining the arguments for the request, Turkey’s Deputy Prime Minister Bekir Bozdag said.<\/p>\n
Salih Muslim, a prominent former leader of the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) in Syria,\u00a0was arrested in the Czech capital of Prague on Saturday at Turkey’s request.<\/p>\n
Bozdag said in a televised interview on Monday that Muslim is in police custody and would appear before a court in Prague later in the day.<\/p>\n
“Turkey expects Salih Muslim – who is a leader of a terrorist group and is still actively plotting terrorist attacks against Turkey – to be extradited to our country in line with legal requirements between our countries,” Bozdag was quoted as saying.<\/p>\n
Czech authorities are to decide whether or not he would be remanded in custody, and returned to Turkey.<\/p>\n
PYD officials in northern Syria confirmed his arrest to Al Jazeera on Sunday, saying that it was not clear if he would be handed over to Turkey.<\/p>\n
Turkey’s interior ministry had offered a bounty of nearly $1m for the arrest of Muslim, who is listed by Ankara as a “most wanted terrorist”.<\/p>\n
According to state-run Anadolu news agency, the file for extradition recalls that a high court in Ankara had filed a case against Muslim for a deadly attack carried out in the capital in 2016.<\/p>\n
The charges against him include damaging national unity and integrity, deliberate murder, damaging public property and transferring dangerous materials, according to Anadolu.<\/p>\n
The March 2016 attack at a popular shopping area in central Ankara\u00a0had been carried out by an explosive-laden vehicle, and\u00a0left 37 people dead and dozens others injured.<\/p>\n
The court had also issued an arrest warrant for Muslim, and asked\u00a0the Interpol to issue a red notice against him.<\/p>\n
Turkey considers the PYD and its armed wing, the\u00a0Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) to be “terrorist groups” with ties to the banned Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) active in Turkey.<\/p>\n
The PKK has waged a decades-long armed fight against the Turkish state that has killed tens of thousands of people.<\/p>\n
The arrest came after Turkey called on the Czech Republic to arrest the former co-leader and sent warrants for his arrest to Prague, Turkish officials said.<\/p>\n
Turkey – together with the Free Syrian Army (FSA) rebel group – last month launched an air and ground offensive\u00a0into Afrin\u00a0in the northwest of\u00a0Syria\u00a0to vanquish the US-backed YPG fighters near its border.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Salih Muslim, a former leader of Syria’s Kurdish PYD, was arrested in Czech Republic on Saturday at Turkey’s request. Turkey has submitted a request to extradite a\u00a0former Kurdish Syrian leader\u00a0from the Czech Republic, with a file explaining the arguments for the request, Turkey’s Deputy Prime Minister Bekir Bozdag said. Salih Muslim, a prominent former leader […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1659,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1658","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"views":82,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theworldinsight.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1658"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theworldinsight.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theworldinsight.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theworldinsight.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theworldinsight.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1658"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/theworldinsight.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1658\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1660,"href":"https:\/\/theworldinsight.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1658\/revisions\/1660"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theworldinsight.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1659"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theworldinsight.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1658"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theworldinsight.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1658"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theworldinsight.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1658"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}