ISTANBUL, April 1 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) - A series of coordinated raids in Turkey and four European countries on Thursday, April 1, helped nap 53 suspected members of an outlawed armed Marxist group commanding a campaign of murder in Turkey over the past three decades.

"Thirty-seven people were arrested in Istanbul and 16 elsewhere," reported the BBC News Online quoting a Turkish interior ministry official.

The arrestees are all members of the Revolutionary People's Liberation Party-Front (DHKP-C), which seeks replacing the Turkish government with a Marxist regime.

The group has been designated a terror organization by the United States and the European Union since May 2002.

The early morning raids come after a year of investigation into the activities of the group which revealed it was active in Germany, Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands.

Ankara has long accused European countries of tolerating the presence of DHKP-C militants and enabling them to direct violent activities in Turkey from abroad.

Nicola Miriano, Perugia's chief prosecutor, told reporters phone and wire taps had revealed the flow of funds, arms and information among supporters of the group in many European countries.

"We didn't have information of an attack on Italy, but there was information pointing to the claiming of attacks in Turkey," he said.

"We are convinced that we have eliminated the Italian cell of the group, although we still have to verify other things," stressed the prosecutor.

Among those arrested in Perugia was Moreno Pasquinelli, described by police as the spokesman for a movement known as the Anti-Imperialist Camp, which supports DHKP-C.

They also included Fehriye Erdal, whom Ankara had long pressed for his detention in Belgium over the murders of prominent Turkish businessman Ozdemir Sabanci, his aide and secretary in 1996.

A leading Turkish counter-terrorism expert told the BBC that recent intelligence suggest DHKP-C has been trying to regain prominence by imitating the style of Al-Qaeda.

"This group (has been) recently inspired by Al-Qaeda, although they are not in the same line of argument," Dr Ihsan Bal from the Police Academy in Ankara said.

Most recently, the group claimed responsibility for bomb attacks on a justice ministry building in August 2003, in which 17 policemen were injured, and on a bus carrying prosecutors in June 2003, in which five people were injured.