53 militants arrested in coordinated crackdown

ANKARA, Turkey -- Turkey, Italy and Belgium arrested 53 militants Thursday in a coordinated crackdown on a Turkish Marxist group considered a terrorist organization by Washington, D.C., Turkey's Interior Ministry said.\nPolice in Istanbul, Turkey, arrested 37 suspects of the Marxist Revolutionary People's Liberation Army-Front, or DHKP-C, while security forces in Italy and Belgium detained 16, an Interior Ministry official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.\nTurkish and German police have been preparing for the crackdown for the past year, while the Italian police became involved more recently, the official said.\nGerman and Italian police discovered during their investigations the group also was active in the Netherlands and Belgium and coordinated the European crackdown outside of Turkey, the official said.\nThe DHKP-C seeks to topple the Turkish government and replace it with a Marxist one. The group and its forerunner, Dev Sol, have claimed responsibility for a number of bombings in Turkey, including two suicide attacks in 2001 that killed three Istanbul policemen and an Australian woman. It has also carried out attacks in Germany and has targeted U.S. military personnel and diplomatic missions.\nThe group was active before the 1980 coup in Turkey but has become increasingly marginalized due to a harsh police crackdown.\nSeveral leading members of the group fled to Europe, where it is believed the group has hundreds of sympathizers.\nPolice earlier said a suspected DHKP-C militant was injured in Istanbul Thursday, reportedly when a bomb he was making exploded. Police later said the blast was a gas explosion in a home and the injured man, Hasan Midilli, was not part of any militant organization, the Anatolia news agency reported.\nIn Italy, police arrested five people Thursday in the central town of Perugia, Italian Prosecutor Nicola Miriano said. About 100 police and Carabinieri paramilitary forces took part in those raids.\nItalian Interior Minister Giuseppe Pisanu said the operation broke up the movement's cell based in Perugia and showed links between the Turks and Italian far-left militants. He said three of those detained were Italian.\nMiriano said the three Italians were believed to have provided the suspected Turkish militants with money, equipment, cell phone cards and other logistical support. One of the three is a woman who married a Turkish suspect only to help him get papers, he said.