ANKARA, July 16 (AFP) - The Turkish government said on Friday it planned to ask Austria to extradite a man it describes as a leading figure from the criminal underworld, whose links to the government of former prime minister Mesut Yilmaz triggered its collapse six years ago.
"We have asked the authorities in the country concerned to remand him into custody. His extradition file will be sent to them immediately," Justice Minister Cemil Cicek told the media.
Alaattin Cakici, 51, was arrested on Wednesday by members of Austria's elite Cobra police unit near the southern Austrian city of Graz, the interior ministry in Vienna announced on Thursday.
The former far-right militant, who has already spent three years behind bars for membership of a criminal organisation, had been sought by the Turkish authorities and Interpol since 2002.
Cicek said there was no obstacle to Cakici's extradition since Turkey had abolished the death penalty in 2002 and stripped all its laws of reference to it. The existence of capital punishment had previously prevented the return to Turkey of certain criminal suspects.
"There are no longer any obstacles to the extradition of criminals," he said.
Cakici is one of Turkey's most wanted suspects.
The former member of the Grey Wolves, a violent group of nationalist extremists, was on the run during most of the 1990s.
In September 1998 he was sentenced to six months in jail in France for falsifying a passport and identity card.
In December 1999 he was extradited to Turkey from France but only on condition that he would not be made to stand trial for offences carrying the death penalty.
As a result of that proviso, Cakici was not tried for allegedly murdering his wife, a former associate and three other people. Prosecutors had requested five times that he be condemned to death for allegedly ordering the killings.
He spent three years behind bars for membership of a criminal organisation. But an amnesty approved in 1999 allowed him to escape a separate three-year jail term for ordering an attack on a journalist and when he was condemned in 2002 to another three years in prison for ordering an armed attack on a cafe used by a rival gang the court took account of the time he had spent in custody and freed him at once.
Cakici had said while in detention in France in 1998 that he had links with Turkey's intelligence services and was protected by Turkish politicians. He also said he had spoken more than a dozen times by telephone to then prime minister Yilmaz.
Yilmaz denied the allegations but his government fell on November 25, 1998, after being censured by the Turkish parliament for "hidden links with organised crime".
Its collapse followed revelations that a businessman buying a bank with the encouragement of Yilmaz had ties to Cakici, a fact allegedly known to the prime minister.
On Tuesday parliament ordered Yilmaz and his former economy minister Gunes Taner to stand trial over the bank privatisation scandal before a special court that offers no right of appeal.
The spokesman for the Turkish police, Ramazan Er, told a news conference on Friday that police had detained in Izmir, western Turkey, a senior official whose passport had been used by Cakici.
The media named the official as a former member of Turkey's secret services.
According to a report by the Ankara Chamber of Commerce, the criminal underworld is involved in 100 different sectors of the Turkish economy and controls black market dealings worth 60 billion dollars (nearly 50 billion euros) a year.