TURKEY SAYS PIPELINE TALKS WITH GDF CONTINUING

(from subsequent reports)

Turkey is still negotiating with Gaz de France (GDF) for the French firm to take a stake in a major gas pipeline project, a foreign ministry official said Friday.

A press report had claimed Thursday that state-owned Turkish oil and gas company BOTAS had suspended talks with GDF because of French pressure to label Turkish action against Armenians during World War I as genocide.

"This is not a final decision. We understand that the negotiating process has not yet come to an end," the diplomat told AFP on the condition of anonymity.

"This is a commercial issue between companies and they will make the final decision on the basis of financial considerations," he added.

The five-company Nabucco consortium involving BOTAS plans to build a 3,300-kilometre (2,000-mile) pipeline that will carry natural gas from the Middle East and Central Asia to the European Union via Turkey and the Balkans, bypassing Russia.

The other partners are Austria's oil and gas group OMV, Hungary's MOL, Bulgaria's Bulgargaz and Romania's Transgaz.

The consortium is seeking a sixth partner in the six-billion-dollar(4.5-billion-euro) project, expected to become operational in 2012.

The other partners reportedly approved GDF's participation, but BOTAS has opposed it because of a French draft law on the Armenian massacres.

A bill was adopted by the National Assembly in Paris in October calling for jail sentences for those who deny that Ottoman Turks committed genocide against Armenians during World War I.

It must still go before the Senate, then back to the lower house before becoming law.

Turkey had at the time threatened unspecified measures against the bill, which followed a 2001 resolution by the French parliament
recognising the killings as genocide.

In November, the Turkish army froze bilateral military ties with France over the bill.

Armenians say up to 1.5 million of their kin perished in orchestrated killings between 1915 and 1917 under the Ottoman Empire.

Turkey categorically rejects the genocide label and says thousands of Turks and Armenians were killed in civil strife when Armenians took up arms for independence in eastern Anatolia and sided with Russian troops invading the crumbling empire.