Hizbullah-linked group moves to become party

ANKARA - Hürriyet Daily News

Members of a defunct association with reported links to Turkey’s outlawed Islamist Hizbullah organization submitted a petition to the Interior Ministry yesterday to create a new party, the Free Cause Party (Hüda-Par).

The petition for the new party was given to the ministry by Mehmet Hüseyin Yılmaz, the former chair of the now-defunct Association for Solidarity with The Oppressed (Mustazaf-Der).

Mustazaf-Der was shut down in May 2012 for alleged links with the Hizbullah terror organization, which is unrelated to the Lebanese militant group, Hezbollah.

Yılmaz told reporters that they had begun moving to establish a party following the closure of Mustazaf-Der.

“We are a party which is candidate to be the party of people, not of the system, and which is a defender of the righteous among the people,” Yılmaz said.

Hizbullah hit the headlines in 2000, when police found the bodies of 70 people allegedly tortured and murdered by the organization in mass graves across the country. Active mostly in southeastern Turkey, the group is listed by Ankara as a terrorist organization that seeks to replace the country’s secular system with a hard-line Islamic regime.