ANKARA (AFP) – A senior Turkish minister yesterday described as politically motivated the outcry in Europe over a German teenager held here on sex abuse charges and urged respect for the Turkish judiciary.

“The independent judiciary will decide. I see the exaggeration of the case as political,” Deputy Prime Minister Mehmet Ali Sahin told the Anatolia news agency. Sahin said the independence of the judiciary was one of the norms Turkey must fulfill in order to join the EU.

“The political authority cannot interfere with or give orders to judicial bodies,” he said. “When (European countries) say they cannot interfere with the judiciary, they must remember that the same principle is also valid for us.” In a case that has grabbed headlines both in Germany and Turkey, a 17-year-old German identified only as Marco W. was arrested in Turkey on April 11 accused of sexually abusing a 13-year-old British girl in the Mediterranean resort of Antalya.

Last week, the boy’s family told the German press that Marco had been held in a Turkish prison for 10 weeks in poor condition and made an emotional appeal for his release. The mass-circulation daily Sabah yesterday quoted Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker as saying he could not “accept the fact that a German boy was being held in a Turkish prison under bad conditions.”

“The racist mentality is out in the open,” the newspaper said in its banner headline.