A British teenager accused of trying to join the proscribed Kurdish terrorist organisation the PKK has claimed she lied about wanting to become a militant to cover up the fact she was travelling to Europe to met a man.
Silhan Ozcelik, 18, left her north London home on a one-way ticket to Brussels, allegedly leaving a letter for her distraught family in which she wrote: “As you read this letter at this moment I will have joined the PKK.”
The teenager, born in London and of Kurdish descent, denies one charge of engaging in conduct in preparation for terrorist acts.
Ozcelik told the Old Bailey that she had invented joining the PKK, or Kurdistan Workers party, so she could meet a 28-year-old man, Mehmet Orhan, whom she had met in London, but who lived in Belgium, and with whom she hoped to have a relationship.
“I couldn’t have told my parents I was going off with a boy, it was really shameful in our community,” she told the jury. “I thought even if it doesn’t work out, and I come home, my family would accept me.
“In the Kurdish community, if you say I’m joining the PKK, everyone will look up to you, they’ll respect you. If you say you’re going off with a boy, the situation changes.”
Ozcelik left her Highbury home for Brussels on 27 October 2014 and was arrested at Stansted airport after flying back from Cologne, Germany, on 16 January 2015.
Earlier, the jury were told she left two letters and a video for her family in which she said she had dreamed for five years of joining the PKK, since watching a film called Beritan, about a female Kurdish fighter, when she was 13.
In the letters and video, she said she had taken soil from the grave of another female fighter, “Comrade Ronahi”, and made a promise, the jury heard.
The video shows her as saying that she could not stand by while Islamic State fighters occupied the largely Kurdish city of Kobani in Syria. “Our honour is being crushed there,” she said, adding that Isis were “behaving like barbarians” and “raping women”.
In the footage, she added: “Our race is dying. I can’t be expected to stay quietly here.” The jury also heard that in her letters she wrote “I thirst for the guerilla [sic] like a flower in the desert” and that just touching a PKK flag “brings a torrent of love”.
“When I hear the name PKK, my heart feels it is going to burst,” she wrote. She wanted to be “a bride of the mountains” . But, giving evidence, Ozcelik said they were just words she had taken from Beritan, which depicts the death of a female fighter, a film she described as melodramatic and romantic.
She said a collage of PKK leaders, Kurdish and Turkish socialists, slogans and pictures of female fighters found in her bedroom was part of a school project when she was 13 or 14. She also told the jury she admired the PKK and its Syrian counterpart, YPG, for defending innocent people in Kobani.
Ozcelik denied wanting or trying to join the PKK when questioned by Peter Rowlands, defending. Of her time in Belgium, and later Holland and Germany, she said initially she was happy to be there and felt like an adult away from her strict home in London, where she was expected to be home by 5pm.
Ozcelik told the court she was disappointed that no relationship developed with Orhan and she resented that she ended up cooking, cleaning and shopping for him and his friends. Eventually she called her mother and told her the truth, she said, but made her promise not to tell other family members.
She regretted making the video, she said. “It not only caused trouble for myself, but it caused trouble for my family and everyone else.”
The prosecution alleges that between 1-27 October 2014, with the intention of committing acts of terrorism, Ozcelik arranged to travel to Europe to join and fight for the PKK, and that she travelled to Belgium for the purpose of joining the PKK to commit acts of terrorism. The case continues.
