A delegation from Turkey's main pro-Kurdish DEM party on Saturday visited jailed PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan, who is serving life on a prison island off Istanbul, party officials said.

The leader of separatist Kurdish group PKK said he’s ready to cooperate with the Turkish government in a bid to end a long-running conflict that has claimed thousands of lives, according to a statement by the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party,

The DEM party's visit to Ocalan, in solitary confinement in an island prison since 1999, was their first in nine years.

Turkey has decided to allow parliament's pro-Kurdish DEM Party to hold face-to-face talks with militant leader Abdullah Ocalan on his island prison, the party said on Friday, setting up the first such visit in nearly a decade.

The Justice Ministry has approved the pro-PKK Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party (DEM Party)’s request to visit the imprisoned leader of

The jailed leader of Turkey's outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), Abdullah Ocalan, has been quoted as indicating he may be prepared to call for militants to lay down arms, after a key ally of President Tayyip Erdogan urged him to end the group's decades-old insurgency.

Abdullah Ocalan is the imprisoned leader of the Kurdistan Worker’s Party and has been serving a life sentence since 1999.