Banned Terror Group Marches Through London

A banned terror group took part in last week’s May Day rally in central London, unhindered by police.

Despite having been designated a proscribed terrorist organisation in the UK since March 2001 the Turkish Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party-Front (DHKP-C) was visible at the May Day Parade in London this year. Photographs published by Breitbart London show the distinctive flags and colourful uniforms of DHKP-C supporters. A banner also carried in the march displayed a picture of Elif Sultan Kalsen, who tried to raid police headquarters in Istanbul last month, posing with a pistol across her chest.

AP now reports that Germany’s interior ministry has announced the banning of the group’s newspaper Yürüyüş. The DHKP-C has been banned in Germany since 1998 to prevent it from using the country as a base for armed struggle against the Turkish state. The German government alleges that the banned newspaper promoted suicide bombings as an indispensable means of class struggle to change Turkey’s society.

According to America’s National Counterterrorism Center the group “espouses an anti-US, anti-NATO and anti-Turkish establishment ideology and has targeted US interests intermittently for several decades.” Amongst other aims it pursues the overthrow of the Turkish state in favour of a Marxist-Leninist regime and the removal of the US and NATO footprint from Turkey.

The most recent high profile act committed by the DHKP-C was the killing of senior prosecutor Mehmet Selim Kiraz in Istanbul on 31 March. A day later DHKP-C member Elif Sultan Kalsen was killed by Turkish police after she and an accomplice tried to raid police headquarters in Istanbul armed with a rifle, hangun and grenades.