TEHRAN: A senior Iranian member of parliament said on Sunday that Iranian forces had captured a high-level member of the Turkish Kurd rebel group the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).
"Our country’s intelligence forces have carried out an important task and have arrested the second (highest) person in the PKK," Alaedin Boroujerdi, head of parliament’s foreign affairs committee, told the semi-official Mehr news agency.
No officials in Iran or Turkey were immediately available to confirm the report.
On Saturday evening a Turkish television channel reported that Iran had arrested Murat Karayilan, the PKK’s field commander and deputy to jailed PKK chief Abdullah Ocalan. It later withdrew the story.
A website close to the PKK which carries its statements denied the report.
Iranian forces often clash with Kurdish guerrillas said to be members of Party of Free Life of Kurdistan (PJAK), an offshoot of the PKK which took up arms in 1984 for an ethnic homeland in southeast Turkey and northwest Iran.
