“Once we exited the residency door I knew something was wrong,” interpreter Melsa Deniz said. “The last I saw of him was when his jeep turned into a building marked ‘police station.’ I counted five white men. I knew it was over.”
Turkey had finally got its man. Fifteen years after the organisation he founded, the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) announced the beginning of armed struggle, a heavily drugged and blindfolded Abdullah Ocalan was bundled onto a Falcon jet bound for Turkey.
Known as “Black Day” for millions of Kurds, the weeks leading up to the eventual capture of Ocalan in the Kenyan capital Nairobi on February 15 1999 read like a spy thriller involving the intelligence services of the world’s most powerful countries including the US and Israel.