After a trial that has been dragging on for more then a year now, Erdal has been sentenced on Thursday to spend five years in prison. Accused of having been the responsible of the area of Hamburg and Berlin for the DHKP-C in-between 2002 and 2013 he was convicted in accordance with the notorious §§ 129b („Support of a foreign terrorist organization“) that is regularly used to criminalize the work of Turkish activists. For Erdal, there have already been plenty of actions in the past, be it in Hamburg, country-wide or international, because despite the terror the counter-revolution is pressing upon him, he has not relented and continues to stand up for his political believes.
In fact, Erdal has already been in prison once: From 1995 until 2001 he was detained in a prison in Turkey, participated in the hunger strike against the F-Type-Prisions and has been tortured multiple times in these years. So much so, that he had to be declared unfit for further detention in 2001 due to his extremely bad health situation. Consequently, he came to Belgium to seek political refuge, but was extradited in 2017 to the FRG were he has now, again, been sentenced in collaboration with the Turkish state and in total disregard of his critical health.
