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ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — The trial of prominent German Kurdish singer Hozan Cane arrested on terror charges continued in Istanbul on Tuesday, months after her conditional release.
Saide Inac, better known as Hozan Cane, was based in the German city of Cologne before she was detained by Turkish security forces in June 2018 for alleged links to the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) – a Kurdish armed group fighting for increased rights for the minority in Turkey, but deemed a terrorist organisation by Ankara.
She had come to Turkey to support the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party’s (HDP) election campaign in Turkey’s presidential and parliamentary elections, which were held two days after her detention, according to her manager Mehmet Akbas. She was handed six years and three months in prison in November of the same year for “membership of a terrorist organisation.”
She was conditionally released on October 1, 2020, on the grounds that she stay in the country.
“I have been out for four months, but it still feels like prison to me,” she told Rudaw’s Rawin Sterk on Tuesday.
Hozan Cane said it was her sixth court appearance, claiming her case is political. “My case is not legal but political. They [courts] have extended my case due to political reasons.”
According to Hozan Cane, a former HDP member, Ilkan Akkaya, gave evidence against her to police, claiming that he saw her filming in Syrian city of Kobane and fighting alongside People’s Protection Units (YPG) – which Ankara sees as the Syrian offshoot of the PKK.
“He has no evidence and he lied,” she said.
Akbas told Rudaw that she was detained for her involvement in a 2018 film on the ISIS genocide against Yazidis in Shingal, which featured people dressed in YPG uniforms.
The fifty-year-old singer is originally from Turkey, but fled to Germany in the 1990s when Ankara’s crackdown on Kurds intensified.
The court did not make any final decision on Tuesday. The next hearing is scheduled for May 5.
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