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A Finnish court on Thursday released five men who confessed to trying to set fire to the Turkish embassy in Helsinki last month, police said. “Police asked the court to release them as they have confessed

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According to Hurriyet, A Finnish court on Thursday released five men who confessed to trying to set fire to the Turkish embassy in Helsinki last month, police said.

“Police asked the court to release them as they have confessed,” Helsinki police inspector Markku Stenberg told AFP.

“They will face the consequences of their actions (in court) in due course,” he said, adding that police would hand over their investigation papers to the prosecutor in about a month.

The five men, whose names have not been given, are all Turkish citizens aged between 16 to 20. At least some of them are Kurds, according to police.

They used a flammable liquid to set the door of the embassy building ablaze in the early hours of Oct. 21. The fire was quickly detected by a police patrol and extinguished, but one embassy worker was hospitalised with injuries.

“They said poor treatment of Kurds in Turkey had caused them to carry out the act,” Stenberg noted, adding the men had described the act as “a sudden impulse.”

Shortly after the attack, the Turkish embassy said it carried “all the signs of a politically motivated” attack by the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK.

A day before the attack, around 200 Kurds had demonstrated outside the embassy in support of Abdullah Ocalan, the head of the PKK, who has been jailed since 1999.

The PKK is blacklisted as a terrorist organisation by the European Union and the United States. Some 44,000 people have died since it took up arms against Turkish troops in 1984.

, Voice of a Nation

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