A court in western Germany has sentenced a 60-year-old Turkish citizen for being a member of the terrorist group PKK. Koblenz regional court convicted the man, whose name was not released, to two years and six months detention for “membership in a foreign terrorist organisation.” Prosecutors indicted the defendant, who lives in Germany, of managing propaganda campaigns and demanding donations for the PKK.

The Higher Regional Court of Hamburg stated that the individual was one of the key figures of the terror group in Germany, and was accountable for the PKK’s activities in the western cities of Cologne and Hamburg between 2018 and 2020. The 50-year-old was extradited from the Greek Cypriot government in June, after his arrest there in March, upon a European arrest warrant given by the German authorities as part of an anti-terrorism investigation.

The PKK has been on the EU’s terror parties list since 2002 and has been categorised as an “ethno-nationalist” and “separatist” terrorist organisation by the bloc’s police mechanism, EUROPOL. Despite the prohibition, the group remains involved in Germany with nearly 15,000 followers among the Kurdish immigrant population, according to the country’s domestic intelligence agency BfV.

In the PKK’s decades-old terror movement against the Turkish state, more than 40,000 people, including women and children, have been slain. Turkey, the US and the EU identify the PKK as a terrorist organisation. The YPG is the PKK’s Syrian offshoot.

This comes after 135 foreign terrorists, who entered the YPG/PKK and took part in armed raids in Syria and Iraq, were returned to Germany in early July 2020. Germany’s domestic intelligence mechanism BfV warned in its annual declaration that the PKK remains the biggest foreign extremist group in the country, and its supporters can carry out violent raids if they receive instructions from the group leaders abroad.

Since 2013, at least 270 people from Germany crossed to northern Syria and Iraq where they received military activity from the PKK and took part in terror aggression in the region and in southeastern Turkey, according to the report. “At least 23 of them died in the battle zones. About 135 of them returned to Germany in the meantime,” the BfV report stated, without giving any further details.

According to the BfV, the PKK set up new cover associations in Germany last year to continue its recruitment, propaganda and fundraising movements. The report stated that it had nearly 14,500 followers among the country’s immigrant population, and raised an estimated $18.1 million in Germany in various campaigns last year.

The PKK, which is classified as an “ethno-nationalist” and “separatist” terrorist organisation by the EU’s law enforcement agency EUROPOL, has been banned in Germany since 1993.

Turkey has long insisted German authorities to take more serious measures against the PKK’s activities in this country.