ANKARA - Turkey has dismissed as "complete lies" accusations that jailed Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan was being slowly poisoned in prison, but says it has sent a team of doctors to examine him.
Ocalan, former leader of the banned Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), is serving a lifesentence on a tiny island in the Sea of Marmara near Istanbul for his role in an armed rebellion against Ankara's rule in southeast Turkey that began in 1984.
Last week, his lawyers said they had evidence he was being systematically exposed to toxins that could endanger his life and called for an independent medical examination, a call echoed by Kurdish politicians in restive southeast Turkey.
Government spokesman Cemil Cicek, who is also justice minister, said: "The claims of poisoning are complete lies... If Turkey were such a country it would have done such a thing long ago, but this is a state based on the rule of law."
But he added that a team of three Turkish doctors had travelled to the island prison on Monday to conduct medical tests in an effort to reassure public opinion. CNN Turk said the doctors included a toxicologist.
Cicek linked the lawyers' claims to a recent decision by the Council of Europe, the continent's rights watchdog, to dismiss a call to reopen the Ocalan case, implying they were politically motivated.
Turkey faces elections this year and some Turkish commentators say Kurdish separatists are trying to push Ocalan back onto the agenda in an effort to galvanise their supporters.
Ocalan was originally condemned to death for treason over a conflict that cost the lives of more than 30,000 people in the 1980s and 1990s. His sentence was subsequently commuted to life imprisonment.
