Fugitive Turkish Rebel Leaves Italy, Reportedly for Moscow

Kurdish guerrilla leader Abdullah Ocalan, Turkey’s most wanted criminal, flew out of Italy a free man Saturday, leaving behind a diplomatic debacle.

“Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan, having decided to leave Italy, has been accompanied to the border,” said a terse two-line statement from the Italian government.

Italian media said that Ocalan--leader of the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, which is outlawed in Turkey--had gone to Moscow. The reports could not immediately be confirmed, and a government spokesman declined to give details for “security reasons.”

Ocalan’s lawyer refused to say where he had gone. “It’s a destination that only the interested party knows,” attorney Luigi Saraceni told Italian state radio. Saraceni said that Ocalan left of his own accord at midday.

Ocalan was arrested in Italy on Nov. 12 on a German warrant when he flew in from Moscow on a false passport.

Italy rejected Turkey’s request to extradite him immediately because of a constitutional ban on returning suspects to a country where they could face the death penalty. The Kurdish chief had at first looked destined to face a trial in Germany.

But Bonn, fearing tension between Germany’s 2 million Turks and its half a million Kurds, withdrew the warrant, hoping that he could still be brought before an international tribunal.

The situation was complicated still further last month when a Rome appeals court freed Ocalan and when further petitions by lawyers acting for Turkey asking Italy to put Ocalan under preventive detention were thrown out.

Ocalan had applied for political asylum, but Italy was reluctant to consider that option for a man branded publicly a “terrorist” by Prime Minister Massimo D’Alema.

The guerrilla chief had been holed up in a villa on the outskirts of Rome, searching for another West European country to take him in. If he was indeed headed for Russia, that could mean his search was futile.

Throughout his stay in Italy, Ocalan said he was ready to abandon the armed struggle for Kurdish autonomy if Turkey would enter into talks with the Kurds.

Turkey adamantly refused, and the U.S. backed it, calling him a terrorist and alleging that the PKK was involved in drug trafficking.