A prosecutor on Wednesday issued an arrest warrant for Turkey's former Islamist Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan to put him in jail to serve a one-year sentence for inciting racial and religious hatred.
"The arrest warrant has been sent to the police and gendarmerie forces," Ibrahim Can Demircioglu, the prosecutor in Edremit, in western Turkey, told the all-news NTV channel.
Erbakan spends his summer holidays at his villa in Altinoluk, on the Aegean, in the Edremit area.
Turkey's appeals court on July 5 upheld a one-year sentence passed against Erbakan, 74, in March, who was convicted of inciting racial and religious hatred for making pro-Islamist and pro-Kurdish remarks during a 1994 election campaign.
Erbakan's legal time to surrender to security forces expired Tuesday.
In Ankara, meanwhile, a lawyer for Erbakan applied to the office of the chief prosecutor for a four-month suspension of the execution of the sentence, Anatolia news agency reported.
Under the Turkish penal code, Erbakan, who was Turkey's first Islamist prime minister and who resigned in 1997 after a year in office following a military-led anti-Islamist campaign, would serve some five months in jail but be barred from politics for life.
The European Court of Human Rights last month rejected Erbakan's appeal to ask Turkey to put his sentence on hold.
Turkey's constitutional court had already slapped a five-year political ban on Erbakan and several other party leaders in 1998 when his Welfare Party was banned for anti-secular activities - ANKARA (AFP)
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