ISTANBUL, Oct 16 (AFP) - The husband of Kurdish activist Leyla Zana was released Saturday after spending a night in police custody following his return to Turkey after nine years in exile, his lawyer told AFP.
Mehdi Zana, a prominent Kurdish politician himself, was detained Friday while going through passport control at Istanbul's Ataturk airport on the basis of arrest warrants issued against him in absentia.
He was taken to an Istanbul court Saturday, where the judge decided to free him on the grounds that charges leveled against him in the past had ceased to constitute offence under democracy reforms that Turkey has recently passed to boost its bid to join the European Union.
Zana's lawyer, Selim Okcuoglu, explained that out of four cases that had been opened against his client, only one now remained pending, but expressed confidence that he would be acquitted.
"The indictment is based on very weak arguements and I do not expect him to be convicted," he told AFP.
The case was opened in 1995 in Diyarbakir, the main city of Turkey's predominantly Kurdish southeast where Zana was mayor in the past.
He faces charges of membership of an illegal organization -- a reference to the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which has fought a bloody 15-year campaign for self-rule in the region -- an offence which carries up to 12 and a half years in jail.
Zana was detained as he arrived in Turkey from Brussels where his wife Wednesday belatedly received the European Parliament's Sakharov prize for human rights, awarded to her in 1995 while she was in jail.
The president of the European Parliament, Josep Borrell, welcomed Zana's release as "an act that shows a positive development of the political situation in Turkey".
Leyla Zana, the first Kurdish woman ever elected to Turkey's parliament, received the award at a ceremony following her release in June after serving a decade in jail for links with PKK rebels.
Zana was reunited in Brussels with her husband and two children for the first time in years.
Her husband has been in exile in Sweden since he was released from Turkish prison in 1995 after serving more than a decade for his political views.
He was stripped of his post of Diyarbakir mayor after a 1980 military coup.
It was because of his imprisonment that Leyla Zana, then a young uneducated mother of two, went into politics.
She was stripped of her parliamentary immunity in 1994 and jailed.
Later this month, a court in Ankara is set to start reviewing the jail sentences of Leyla Zana and three other former Kurdish parliament members, which have been overturned by the court of appeals.