Alleged Turkish rebels say they fought for Islam

DIYARBAKIR, Turkey (Reuters) -- Alleged Islamic militants facing the death penalty on charges of trying to topple Turkey's secular order said they had fought to spread Islam, but without violence.

Some of the defendants acknowledged that the group had, however, fought an armed struggle against Kurdish rebels, a fact that has led some to suspect the state of supporting Hizbullah.

Fifteen alleged senior members of the Hizbullah group are on trial in southeastern Turkey accused of killing 156 people and wounding 80. Thirteen face the death penalty, which Turkey has not carried out since the mid-1980s.

The defendants are charged with organizing an armed group that aimed to bring strict Islamic law to Turkey.

Authorities say Hizbullah's victims were tortured to death and buried in shallow graves around the country.

"We fought for Islam," said Edip Gumus, believed to be the deputy leader of the group. "I did not take part in a single armed attack. I regret nothing."

Cemal Tutar, one of the 15 accused, told the court:

"We intended to make Islam rule the world, not just Turkey, and we had no aim of doing this by arms. We did not spend a single bullet aiming to break the state's constitutional order...If we had wanted to do that we could have made Turkey a lake of blood with a group of 20 or 30 people."

Hizbullah gained notoriety for the killings of Kurdish rebel sympathizers in the early 1990s at the height of a conflict between Turkish security forces and the separatist Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) that has killed more than 30,000 people.

Tutar told the court that Hizbullah, unrelated to the Iranian-backed Hizbollah (Party of God) group in Lebanon, had carried out armed attacks against the PKK. "At first we won the sympathy of everyone who hated the PKK," he said.

But Mehmet Varol, charged with six killings, denied that the group had been backed by the state: "There are ugly claims that we cooperated with the state. Whatever Hizbullah's aims might be, it could never cooperate with such a state."

In later years Hizbullah began to target moderate Islamists and Kurdish businessmen. Police raids earlier this year as part of a nationwide crackdown led to scores of arrests.

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