Six on trial in UK charged with membership of banned PKK

LONDON, Jan 9 (Reuters) - Six Kurdish people went on trial in Britain on Friday charged with membership of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), a militant group banned in its home country Turkey as well as Britain and elsewhere.

Prosecutors say the defendants, aged between 24 and 63, belonged to or professed to belong to the PKK, which was proscribed as a terrorist organisation in Britain in 2001.

They were charged in December 2024 after a police raid on a Kurdish Community Centre in north London the previous month, with some of the defendants also charged with arranging or addressing meetings in support of the PKK in 2023 and 2024.

The PKK announced last year that it would disarm and disband, and symbolically burned weapons, but it remains widely banned, including in the European Union and the United States.

Ercan Akbal, 57, Ali Boyraz, 63, Agit Karatas, 24, Berfin Kerban, 32, Turkan Ozcan, 60, and Mazlum Sayak, 28, have all pleaded not guilty to membership of a proscribed organisation.

Akbal also denies two counts of arranging a meeting in support of the PKK and two counts of addressing a meeting to encourage support for the PKK.

Ozcan and Sayak deny two counts of arranging a meeting in support of the PKK, and Boyraz and Karatas deny one count of addressing a meeting to encourage support for the PKK.

The PKK fought for four decades for independence or autonomy for Turkey's mainly Kurdish southeast.

"There is nothing wrong with the Kurds wanting self-determination or people campaigning for it ... but it is the means that the PKK used that caused them to be proscribed," Larkin said.

The trial is due to take up to three months.

(Reporting by Sam Tobin; Editing by Kevin Liffey)