{UAH} TURKEY'S PM REJECTS BLAME FOR ESCAPE OF JIHAD HAYAT

Turkish PM Davutoglu has dismissed an accusation that Turkey is responsible for letting an alleged accomplice of the Paris attacks move freely into Syria. On a trip to Berlin, he praised Turkey's anti-terror response.

Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu on Monday rejected an accusation by the Syrian Foreign Ministry that his country was to blame for allowing the partner of ONE of the gunmen in last week's terrorist attacks in Paris to enter Syria through Turkey.

Turkey "will not accept" being assigned blame it doesn't deserve, Davutoglu told reporters during a press conference in the German capital, Berlin, where he was having talks with Chancellor Angela Merkel.

The Syrian Foreign Ministry accused Turkey of allowing terrorists to freely cross the border into their country, after Ankara announced that the common-law WIFE of one of the Paris shooters entered Syria from Turkey earlier this month.

Hayat Boumedienne was the partner of Amedy Coulibaly, who killed a policewoman in Paris and launched an attack on a Jewish supermarket that left four people dead two days after the massacre at the offices of satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo by two other Islamists. Coulibaly died in the resulting police operation, but French Prime Minister Manuel Valls told media on Monday that he did not think Coulibaly could have carried out this attack without help.

According to Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu, Boumedienne arrived in Turkey on January 2 and left six days later for Syria.

Davutoglu insisted that Turkey could not be held responsible for Boumedienne's FREE movement in the time before her name was attached to the killings in Paris.

Turkey is 'key' in the fight against "Islamic State"

The Syrian government had further harsh words for Turkey, which supports the rebellion against President Bashar al-Assad, saying Turkey has aided terrorists who "shed the blood of Syrians and innocent people worldwide."

"The hunt will go on" for Boumedienne (pictured), said France's Manuel Valls

Davutoglu denied this, saying that Turkey has deported more than one thousand foreign nationals whose names appear on a blacklist of 7,000 people collected by various intelligence agencies.

He pointed to the large number of foreigners who travel to Turkey, a popular tourist destination, and said that "we evaluate every tip that we get and our intelligence services work together."

'United stance on terrorism'

Although the two leaders at the Berlin talks disagreed on Turkey's mooted entry into the European Union, with Davutoglu asking for more support from Germany and Merkel maintaining that she is skeptical as to whether such a step is wise, they said they were united in their fight against extremism.

"We stand side by side against terrorism," Merkel told the press conference.

Hans-Georg Maassen, head of Germany's domestic intelligence agency, used Davutoglu's visit to call on Turkey to step up its fights against extremists crossing into Syria to join the "Islamic State" (IS) terrorist group.

Maasssen called Turkey a "key country," because 90 percent of the 550 radicals who have traveled to Syria from Germany arrived via Turkey.

es/tj (AP, dpa, Reuters)

Viele GruBe

Robukui

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