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Bonn won't be intimidated

by Kurd threats: Kinkel

BONN: Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel said in an interview published on Wednesday that Germany would not be intimidated by death threats from the banned Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).

Kinkel had confirmed on Tuesday that he had received such letters from the PKK, fighting a guerrilla war for autonomy in southeastern Turkey, and newspapers reported Chancellor Helmut Kohl had received similar threats.

Austrian authorities on Tuesday announced tightened border controls and police protection for Kohl after threats from the PKK, outlawed in Germany.

Kohl, on holiday at the Bad Hofgastein spa near Salzburg, was under close guard by Austrian and German security officers, Salzburg police chief Anton Stenitzer said.

PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan told the latest edition of the weekly Die Zeit that he could unleash a wave of bomb attacks in Germany unless Bonn ended what the PKK calls support for Ankara's repression of its Kurdish population.

"Mr Ocalan's threats are intolerable," Kinkel told the Cologne Stadt-Anzeiger daily.

"We won't let ourselves be intimidated, and Ocalan and the violent Kurds should know that we will not put up with their militant confrontations in Germany... We will show that our state can defend itself," he said.

Kinkel said the threats of attacks should not be dismissed.

"I believe that after everything that has happened, such threats have to be taken seriously," he said.

Until 1993, Kurdish militants mostly limited their campaign of violence in Germany to attacks on Turkish properties. When this led to the PKK being banned, they began to engage German police in violent clashes.

The most recent wave of Kurdish violence last month has already led Bonn to put forward measures to allow faster deportation of foreigners with criminal convictions.

There are around 500,000 Kurds in Germany out of a Turkish population of over two million.-Reuter