After much hesitation among the dhimmis. From IHT, :
DÃœSSELDORF – Muhammed Metin Kaplan, a German-based Islamic militant sought by Turkey on treason charges, was flown out of Germany to Turkey on Tuesday, hours after a court approved his extradition, a police official said.
“He has taken off,” said Angelika Flader, a spokeswoman for the North Rhine-Westphalia state Interior Ministry in Düsseldorf.
The police detained Kaplan, 51, at an Internet cafe in Cologne and hustled him to the airport in Düsseldorf even though he formally had two weeks to appeal the decision by the Cologne administrative court.
His extradition had been delayed by German courts’ concerns that his followers have been subjected to torture in Turkey and that he could face political persecution.
Turkey has sought Kaplan for trial on charges that he masterminded a failed 1998 plot to crash a plane laden with explosives into the mausoleum of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of the modern secular Turkish state.
Now that would be a richly symbolic target, and I am sure that there are many Armenians and Greeks who would lustily applaud the detonation of that mausoleum. But of course they wouldn’t have been too happy with what Kaplan would have done next.