ANKARA, Sept 14: Facing a popular outcry at home and stern warnings from Europe, the Turkish government discreetly stepped back on Tuesday from a plan to introduce a motion into a crucial penal reform bill to make adultery a crime punishable by prison.

The announcement came in a roundabout way, by implication, and from an unexpected source. After a surprise 20-minute meeting, opposition leader Deniz Baykal, flanked by two top ministers, told expectant reporters: "No motion that does not bear the signatures of both parties will be submitted to the assembly."

Baykal's social-democratic Republican People's Party (CHP) had always opposed the adultery clause. Although none of the men even mentioned adultery, it meant the plan by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Justice and Development Party (AKP) had died a quiet death.

"I am very pleased with this turn of events," Baykal said, stressing that the bill to do away with Turkey's 78-year-old criminal code, adapted in 1926 from that of fascist Italy, was the result of more than a year's work, often at bipartisan level.

Flanking Baykal along with the AKP Justice Minister Cemil Cicek, Foreign Minister and Deputy Premier Abdullah Gul told insistent journalists: "Do not reduce the whole reform bill to just adultery." -AFP