Turkey today granted permission to the family of jailed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) leader Abdullah Ocalan to visit him for the first time in two years, in an apparent bid to counter alarm over his welfare.
Ocalan's family will be allowed to see him at his high security jail on the prison island of Imrali off Istanbul over the Islamic holiday of Eid al-Adha beginning next week, the state-run Anadolu news agency said.
Turkish media reports said this will be the first family visit Ocalan has been allowed since October 6, 2014. Anadolu said Ocalan would meet with his brother Mehmet.
The permission comes as a group of 50 Kurdish activists, including MPs, are on the sixth day of a hunger strike to protest the lack of news about Ocalan's welfare.
However the activists in the mainly Kurdish city of Diyarbakir said they would continue their action until the family returns with concrete confirmation that he is alive and well.
Ocalan founded the armed movement to fight for greater rights for Turkey's Kurds in the 1970s and led a bloody insurrection against the Turkish state that formally began in 1984.
He was captured in 1999 by Turkey's secret service in Kenya, put on trial and sentenced to death. His sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in 2002 when Turkey abolished the death penalty.
Ocalan held secret talks with top officials that resulted in the PKK declaring a ceasefire in 2013. But this collapsed in 2015 and conflict is again raging in Turkey's Kurdish-dominated southeast.
Despised by many Turks as a "baby killer" who has presided over a 32-year conflict that has left tens of thousands dead, Ocalan remains an icon for many in the southeast with his face plastered on flags and banners at rallies.
Ocalan had until then met regularly with a delegation from the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP). But these trips halted with the renewed violence and the last such visit dates back to April 2015.
The last visit to Ocalan was by a delegation of the Council of Europe's Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT) in April 2016. It said there were just four prisoners held on Imrali, in the Sea of Marmara.
The hunger strikers in the mainly Kurdish city of Diyarbakir had said they would continue their strike, despite the landmark news of the family visit.
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