Turkey police detain Islamic rebel group leader

ISTANBUL, Turkey (Reuters) -- Turkish police have arrested the suspected leader of the armed Islamic group Hizbullah, which is accused of dozens of macabre killings over the last two decades, Anatolian news agency said on Tuesday.

Mehmet Sudan was seized with four other senior militants in Istanbul's Kartal district. Sudan was believed by police to have taken control after former leader Huseyin Velioglu was killed in a raid on a Hizbullah hideaway in January.

It did not say when the arrests took place.

The January action and other subsequent raids uncovered more than 60 bodies of people abducted, tortured, murdered and then buried in gardens and under floors.

Many members of Hizbullah, not believed to have any direct connection to the Iranian-backed group of a similar name, have gone on trial on charges of planning to replace the country's officially secular order with one based on Islamic sharia Law.

Hizbullah emerged in the remote southeast in the 1980s and launched attacks mostly on sympathizers of Kurdish separatist guerrillas, sparking accusations that it had secret official support. State authorities deny the accusations.

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