"The 43-year-old doused himself with a liquid and then set himself on fire" outside the courthouse in the western city of Krefeld on Wednesday, police said in a statement. SEE ALSO: German police close down two publishers with Kurdish militant tiesBystanders doused the flames with blankets and a fire extinguisher, and a rescue helicopter took the man to hospital. Last Friday was the 20th anniversary of the day when Turkish secret service agents caught Ocalan in Kenya, outside the Greek embassy in Nairobi -- on February 15th, 1999. Ocalan co-founded the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) in 1978, an organization that is now blacklisted as a terror group by Ankara and its Western allies. The PKK, originally set up to win Kurdish autonomy, became an armed group in 1984 with the aim of creating an independent Kurdish state.

Source: The Local February 21, 2019 08:15 UTC