Germans fly Islam radical to Turkey to face charges

Richard Bernstein
International Herald Tribune
10-13-2004
German police arrested a Turkish Islamic radical on Tuesday and deported him to Turkey, which has sought his extradition for years for his alleged involvement in a failed terrorist attack.The police arrested Mohammed Metin Kaplan at an Internet cafe in Cologne, took him straight to an airport in nearby Dusseldorf and on Tuesday evening put him on a plane bound for Turkey, where he arrived hours later. Kaplan, widely known as the Caliph of Cologne, was the founder and chief leader of an organization, known as The Caliphate, based in Cologne, that was banned by the German government after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The Turkish government has named him as the leader of a 1998 plot to fly an explosives-laden airplane into the mausoleum of Kamal Ataturk, the founder of modern, secular Turkey, at a ceremony at which most of the country's leaders would have been present.But Kaplan, who earlier served four years in prison in Germany for his involvement in the 1997 murder of a rival Muslim cleric, managed to avoid deportation for several years, in large part by appealing to German concerns that he would be tortured in Turkey and subject to the death penalty there. In May, however, a German court ruled that he could be deported because the Turkish government had given assurances in negotiations with the German Interior Ministry that Kaplan's rights would be respected.He was given two months to appeal that decision, and when a court in Cologne on Tuesday reaffirmed that he was eligible for extradition, he was immediately arrested and sent away.''The court said we could deport him, so we did it,'' a Cologne Foreign Office spokesperson, Inge Schurmann, said. Kaplan's deportation was the latest element in a German effort to curb activities of extremist Islamic organizations, though actual deportations have been rare. Kaplan's Caliphate, which was believed at one time to have about 12,000 members in Germany, was one of the first organizations banned after the Sept. 11 attacks, carried out by members of an Islamic group that had lived quietly in Hamburg for several years.Before Sept. 11, German law exempted religious organizations from the country's laws forbidding incitement to racial hatred, but the new law removed that protection, thereby enabling Germany's interior minister to ban the activities of groups like Kaplan's and several others. When he imposed the ban in December 2001, the minister, Otto Schily, cited the Caliphate's anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli declarations.The court in Cologne ruled Tuesday that Kaplan could be deported immediately, even though he still has an appeal pending in a German federal court in Leipzig. The court decided that Kaplan could await the results of that appeal outside Germany.*** Souad Mekhennet contributed reporting for this article from Frankfort.

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