The German government has asked Spain not to extradite the Turkish-German writer Dogan Akhanli, who was arrested on Saturday in Grenada under a search and arrest warrant for his subsequent extradition by Interpol, at the request of Turkey, for “membership of an armed band and terrorist “.
The Spanish police have yet to reveal any reason for the arrest.
A German citizen, Akhanli is committed to memorializing the genocides of the twentieth century, including the Armenian Genocide, and to promoting cross-cultural dialogue with a view to reconciliation.
Akhanli wrote two novels on the mass killings of Armenians in 1915, ‘The Judges of the last Judgment’ and ‘The Last Dream of the Madonna’.
After the 1980 coup d’etat, Akhanli went into hiding and was a political prisoner in a Turkish military jail between 1985 and 1987. He fled Turkey in 1991 and settled in Germany.
In August 2010, he returned to Turkey to visit his dying father, but was arrested at the airport and thrown into prison for four months. Thanks to a campaign in his defense, organized by civil rights activists and Turkish and German intellectuals, he managed to leave Turkey and return to Germany http://panarmenian.net/m/eng/news/245724
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