ISTANBUL (AFP) - A Turkish Islamist militant yesterday rejected charges of terrorism but spoke out in favor of religious rule for Turkey as his trial for allegedly plotting to overthrow the country’s secular system opened here under tight security. Metin Kaplan, 51, the so-called “Caliph of Cologne,” who was extradited from Germany in October after a long legal battle, faces 14 charges, including a purported plot to crash a plane into the mausoleum in Ankara of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of the secular Turkish republic. “I reject accusations of terrorism. I am a Muslim and Islam rejects terrorism,” he told the judge. He said the Germany based extremist organization he leads is in fact a civic group that has never resorted to violence.

ANKARA (AFP) - Turkey’s top leaders attended an emotional funeral ceremony yesterday for five Turkish policemen killed in an ambush in Iraq, pledging every effort to capture and punish “traitors and cowards” behind the attack. President Ahmet Necdet Sezer, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul and Chief of General Staff Gen. Hilmi Ozkok were among the officials who attended the ceremony at the Interior Ministry, along with hundreds of soldiers and policemen. The five officers and two Iraqi drivers died Friday when a four-car convoy carrying a group of policemen assigned to guard duty at the Turkish Embassy in Iraq was ambushed near the northern city of Mosul on its way to Baghdad.

A former ethnic-Albanian rebel leader was sentenced to 10 years in prison yesterday for abducting two Slav-Macedonian policemen and trying to exchange them for two jailed associates. Avdil Jakupi, a rebel commander known as the Jackal, was convicted of “looting and hostage taking” and sentenced by a court in Skopje, capital of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM). Jakupi’s lawyers declared the sentence “politically motivated.” They pledged to appeal the ruling on the basis of a 2001 amnesty law. Jakupi kidnapped the policemen in August 2003 threatening to kill them unless two of his associates were released from prison. (AFP)