A Turkish court sentenced three men to death on charges...

A Turkish court sentenced three men to death on charges linked to the killings of prominent supporters of a secular state, including a former culture minister and an investigative journalist.
Verdicts were handed down on a total of 24 alleged Islamist rebels in a trial that marked the end of high-profile Turkish efforts to solve a series of killings of secularists and leftists in the 1990s.
Lawyers for the defendants had denied charges they belonged to a secretive religious group that aimed to replace Turkey's legal system with one based on Islamic law.
A panel of three judges in a state security court in the capital Ankara found three men guilty of "trying to overturn the constitutional order by force and replace it with a state based on religious principles" - a crime officially punishable by death.
However, the death sentences are unlikely to be carried out as Turkey, a candidate for European Union membership, has put an effective moratorium on executions. It has not carried out the death penalty since the mid 1980s.
Two of the accused had refused to testify in earlier hearings, saying they had been tortured in custody.
The court sentenced another 16 of the defendants to jail terms of between three and 15 years and acquitted four others. One was ordered to be retried on a lesser charge.
The accused had been arrested as part of long-running investigations into the murders of secularist intellectuals, including the killings of former Culture Minister Ahmet Taner Kislali and investigative journalist Ugur Mumcu.
Both died in car bombs, Kislali in 1999 and Mumcu in 1993. Both were writers for the secularist Cumhuriyet newspaper and public defenders of Turkey's secular constitution.