Turkey court convicts Kurdish politician for speech

A Turkish court on Thursday sentenced Kurdish politician Leyla Zana, a former Nobel Peace Prize nominee, to two years in prison for spreading terrorist propaganda, court officials said.

She was convicted by a court in the southeastern Turkish city of Diyarbakir under anti-terrorism laws for a speech she made last year at a Kurdish festival.

At the time, she said the Kurdish people had three leaders - Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani in northern Iraq, and jailed guerrilla Abdullah Ocalan.

Zana came to prominence in 1994 when she was convicted by a state security court for links to militants from Ocalan's separatist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).

She was released in 2004 after Turkey's appeals court overturned her conviction and that of three other Kurdish former lawmakers.

Turkey holds Ocalan responsible for the deaths of 40,000 people in a separatist conflict launched by the PKK in 1984 with the aim of establishing a Kurdish state in southeast Turkey.

The latest conviction came as European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso arrived in Ankara for talks on reforms designed to advance Turkey's troubled EU membership bid.

Central to those reforms is a move to soften a law - article 301 of the penal code - which has been used against hundreds of writers including Nobel Literature Laureate Orhan Pamuk for insulting "Turkishness".

The legal amendment is weaker than Brussels might have hoped, with writers still liable to prosecution for insulting the Turkish nation, although the president will have to give the green light for any trial to proceed.