ISTANBUL, Turkey - Kurdish rebels refused Thursday to release three Germans hostages until Berlin renounces a crackdown on the guerrilla group.
A band of rebels kidnapped the three German climbers from Mount Ararat in far eastern Turkey late Tuesday, authorities said. A spokesman for the Kurdistan Workers' Party, known as the PKK, said the Germans were in good condition.
PKK spokesman Ahmed Danas, confirming in a telephone call to The Associated Press that rebels were holding the climbers, said the group wants the German government to "change its policy" toward the group.
"The German government treats us like enemies, and we don't want that," he said from northern Iraq. "We ask them to change their policy. If they don't, we won't release the German hostages."
In Berlin, Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier called for the immediate and unconditional release of the kidnapped Germans.
Germany "will not let itself be blackmailed," he said Thursday.
Wolfgang Schaeuble, the German interior minister, told MDR Info radio: "There is no question of negotiating with the PKK on whether we apply German laws or not."
PKK rebels have been fighting for autonomy in eastern Turkey since 1984. In the early 1990s, militants abducted foreign tourists and climbers to draw world attention to their cause; all were freed unharmed.
The three Germans kidnapped Tuesday were part of a 13-member team of climbers camped at 10,500 feet (3,200 meters). They were identified by the PKK as Helmut Johann, Martin Georpe and Lars Holper Reime.
Mount Ararat, in far eastern Turkey near the Iranian border, is traditionally considered the site where Noah's biblical Ark ended after the great flood.
"We have no enmity toward the German people and there has been no ill-treatment of the Germans in our custody," the PKK said in a statement carried by the Firat news agency that also demanded that Turkey halt military operations against the group.
The PKK is banned in Germany, where authorities have arrested and tried suspected PKK members. In Berlin, the Foreign Ministry warned that Germans face a further risk of "acts of revenge" following a government decision last month to ban all "economic support" for Roj TV, a station that Turkey says is a propaganda machine for the PKK.
Germany also warned against travel to Turkey's mainly Kurdish southeastern provinces