TURKISH counterterrorism police arrested two more pro-Kurdish MPs yesterday as the European Union debated Ankara’s bid for membership.

The Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) MPs were taken into custody in the capital Ankara in connection with two separate terror-related investigations in the south-eastern cities of Batman and Diyarbakir.

On Monday 67 HDP members were among hundreds arrested in a crackdown after Saturday’s bombing outside the Besiktas football stadium in Istanbul that killed 44.

Responsibility for that attack has been claimed by Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) split the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons (TAK).

EU foreign and European affairs ministers gathered in Brussels yesterday to discuss the bloc’s expansion.

The EU has offered Turkey fast-track membership talks, visa-free travel for its citizens and billions of euros for Syrian refugees in the country in return for Ankara accepting failed non-Syrian asylum-seekers from the EU.

But concern has been raised over the arrests of almost 38,000 people and purges of more than 100,000 others from government jobs, including the armed forces, since the

thwarted coup on July 15.

Belgian Foreign Minister Didier Reynders said that while co-operation with Ankara on terrorism and refugees was important, “it’s difficult to go further with such a situation in Turkey.”

On Monday, Austria demanded that membership talks be frozen, with Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz saying: “It is wrong to continue accession negotiations as if nothing negative has happened in Turkey.”

He went further yesterday in an opinion piece with conservative European People’s Party Group MEPs’ leader Manfred Weber in the daily Die Welt, saying Turkish membership would “significantly overburden the union politically and economically and could strengthen the centrifugal forces in the union even as far as destroying it.”

They favoured “a tailored partnership with mutual rights and obligations” instead of membership, a position long held by Germany and France.