KURDISH political prisoner Gultan Kisanak remained behind bars today after a judge refused her release on the grounds that she once shared a cell with the co-founder of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).

Lawyers argued she should be freed from pre-trial detention, with the former mayor of Diyarbakir having spent five years in prison on trumped-up terrorism charges.

But the request was denied, along with that of 21 others in the so-called Kobane case against leading members of the opposition Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), on the grounds that the defendants were a flight risk.

The judge said that Ms Kisanak’s continued detention was justified because she shared a prison cell with Sakine Cansiz, a leading figure in the PKK who was assassinated in a Paris community centre in 2013.

His decision was made based on an anonymous witness statement which said that she remained highly regarded by the PKK because of her relationship with Cansiz.

The pair were jailed in the notorious Diyarbakir prison in Turkey’s largely Kurdish south-east in 1979, as Kurds and leftists were rounded up ahead of the 1980 military coup.

Inmates were subjected to torture including electrocution, rape and sexual abuse, as well as beatings with sticks and bayonets.

Ms Kisanak has described the abuse as “of barbaric proportions.”

“They tried to beat us down, to rob us of our dignity, to stamp out our Kurdishness, to crush our feminine identity. The torture was unrelenting.  But we resisted,” she said.

She has attributed much of the resilience of the Kurdish women to the role of Cansiz, whose contribution she described as “paramount” in preventing women from breaking down and becoming informers.

When she was mayor of Diyabakir she detailed plans to turn the military-run prison into a museum to commemorate the struggle of those that had resisted.

But Ms Kisanak was jailed in October 2016 on a range of charges including advocating autonomy for the Kurdish people and support for the PKK, along with spreading terrorist propaganda.

She has also been indicted in the case against 108 leading members of the HDP, who face charges after calling for protests over government inaction when the Syrian city of Kobane was held under siege by Isis in 2014.

Fifty-four people were shot dead by Turkish security forces and government-allied paramilitaries during the demonstrations.

But the regime led by authoritarian President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has sought to blame the HDP for the deaths of 37 of its own supporters.