After the verdict in the TKP/ML trial in Munich, the main defendant Müslüm Elma has been released on Tuesday. He was held in custody on remand for more than four years and has today been sentenced to six and a half years imprisonment for "ringleading in a terrorist organization abroad".

His lawyer Antonia von der Behrens stated after the trial: "The defendants have been sentenced to long prison terms in a trial that can only be described as commissioned work for Turkey. TKP/ML is not prohibited in Germany and is not on any terrorist list. Only Turkey has so far classified it as terrorist and is fighting its members, like the entire opposition, with methods that are contrary to human rights. We will appeal against the verdict immediately."

Stefan Kuhn, Elma's second defense attorney, said: "This trial has once again shown how problematic the prosecution of so-called foreign terrorist groups by German law enforcement agencies and courts according to Section 129b of the German Criminal Code (StGB) is: The granting of a prosecution authorization by the Federal Ministry of Justice in this regard leads to the local judiciary criminalizing resistance against the Erdogan regime and thus supporting it.”

In his attempts to understand the accused's motives, the judge found words in the oral statement of the judgement that are seldom heard from a state security senate: "In favour of all the accused, the senate has taken into account that it is convinced that the deeds are rooted in structural repression of minorities, especially Kurds, Alevis and left-wing opponents, by the Turkish state power. Such systematic repression of minorities is capable of challenging, as it were, resistance to the political order from which it emanates. This applies all the more to a large part of the accused, since they have experienced state arbitrariness in Turkey after the result of the hearing of evidence. This is particularly true of Elma, Solmaz, Ugur and Yesilcali, who, according to the Senate, were subjected to repeated torture in Turkish custody.”