Convicted student pays Turkish bail to return to France

ISTANBUL - Agence France-Presse

A French-Turkish student, sentenced last week to more than five years in prison for terrorist propaganda, pays bail of 10,000 Turkish Liras. DHA photo

A French-Turkish student sentenced last week to more than five years in prison for terrorist propaganda on Monday paid bail of 10,000 Turkish Liras (4,250 euros, $5,600) enabling her to return to France pending an appeal, her lawyer said.

The court in Bursa, northwestern Turkey, agreed the bail terms immediately after convicting the 21-year-old Sevil Sevimli on Friday.

"I paid her bail to the court today," her lawyer İnayet Aksu said. "She now has the right to leave Turkish territory at any time," he said, adding that the date for her return to France has not yet been set.

Sevimli's friends and supporters hailed the news, indicating that she may return to the central-eastern French city of Lyon, where she studied before arriving in Turkey in early 2012, as early as Wednesday.

Born in France to Turkish Kurd parents, Sevimli was completing a final year of studies in Turkey with Erasmus, an inter-European university exchange program, at the time of her arrest.

She had joined a May Day parade in Istanbul and went on trial in September on charges punishable by up to 32 years in prison. Although Sevimli was initially accused of belonging to a terrorist organization, the court sentenced her to five years and two months in prison for disseminating propaganda on behalf of the Revolutionary People's Liberation Party-Front (DHKP/C), which is listed as a terrorist group by the United States and the European Union.

She has denied the accusations.

Since the 1970s, the DHKP-C has been behind numerous attacks against the Turkish state that have killed dozens. This month it claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing at the U.S. embassy in Ankara that killed a Turkish security guard.