Austrian student in jail on terror charges in Turkey

Ankara : A Turkish court ordered an Austrian student and journalist to be kept in jail ahead of a trial on terror charges following his detention last week, his lawyer said yesterday. Max Zirngast, who writes for the far-left German-language magazine Re:volt, was detained in Ankara on September 11 and formally arrested by the Ankara court late Thursday, his lawyer Tamer Dogan said. Zirngast, 29, was charged with being a member of an extreme leftist terror organisation, Dogan added.

He had previously published articles on the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has waged an insurgency inside Turkey since 1984. The PKK is blacklisted as a terror group by Ankara and its Western allies. The Austrian has been in Turkey for three years and was a masters student at Middle East Technical University (ODTU) in the political sciences department.